Office:Mac update 11.2.3
We've released the latest update to Office:Mac, 11.2.3. You can download it from Mactopia. There's performance enhancements across the suite, plus some new functionality for Entourage.
The two major pieces of new functionality for Entourage are Sync Services and Spotlight support. With Sync Services, you can now synchronise Entourage with anything that you can sync with iSync. Brian Johnson created a demo movie to show you how to go through it. With Spotlight support, you can now search your Entourage database via Tiger's Spotlight.
There's more details about this update in the Entourage blog.
Comments
- Anonymous
March 16, 2006
This is really fantastic. I've been fighting with Mail.App for a couple of years now, but I couldn't leave it for Entourage without good sync support, and I do love spotlight indexing. This fixed both of my complaints. I'm really thrilled that this was a point release.
Mail is importing even as we speak! - Anonymous
March 16, 2006
Overall, I'm pretty happy with the update and particularly the Spotlight searching. I used to use Entourage prior to OS X 10.4 but with the advent of Spotlight, my large archives of emails and the lack of support in Entourage at that time meant that I've been using Mail for that past year or thereabouts. However, this update means that I've gone back to Entourage and am now able to both search for emails and be more compatible with my Outlook colleagues.
There, however, a few things that have irked me with going back to Entourage that, I hope, can be addressed at some point in the future:
1. Sync Services. Fabulous idea and absolutely necessary. Works great for Address Book but the iCal support is what bothers me. Why only a single calendar? Ideally I'd have liked to have seen my existing iCal calendars replicated in Entourage but at the minimum I would have expected a single iCal calendar to be created per Entourage Project.
2. Proxy Server Support. For some odd reason all Microsoft applications that I have seem to have trouble with the proxy server at work. With Entourage I have needed to set "Bypass proxy setting" servers in the Network System Preferences else Entourage won't connect to my mail server or LDAP; Mail and Address Book don't seem to have this problem. Equally, Messenger refuses to obey the Network System Preferences and use the proxy server settings specified their such that I need to specify the proxy settings manually.
Beyond those 2 issues I think that it's a good update and I'm much happier with things now. If you can sort out those 2 niggles then I'd be very grateful. - Anonymous
March 16, 2006
Marcus,
iCal doesn't support categories or projects, and E'rage doesn't do multiple separate calendars. So you have a POV clash there. There's some things that iCal is pretty stupid about too, for example, you can't chose what calendars are available to Sync Services. You can ONLY turn .Mac sync on and off. If there's no way for iCal to specify which calendars it shares, and you have 40, it becomes an all or nothing issue. So E'rage does the safer thing, and creates it's own calendar in iCal. But iCal has to change some things with regard to its connection to Sync Services.
With the LDAP issue, what kind of errors do you get with E'rage and a proxy. For one, how is you proxy even being used for LDAP at all? There's only two options, SOCKS and Automatic. I'd hazard that Address Book is just ignoring the proxy settings for LDAP.
Again with Messenger, you have the same thing. The Network Settings Proxies don't affect that protocol, so i'm not sure how it could be of any use to you there. - Anonymous
March 16, 2006
take office n shove it - Anonymous
March 16, 2006
Hi John,
Thanks very much for the information about iCal, Entourage and Sync Services. I understand what you mean but it's still a bit annoying since I had been hoping for a total replication between the 2 applications. However, as noted, what is present is certainly an improvement.
In regards to the proxy issue, the problem is that when I am in a network location that specifies a proxy server (e.g. Work Ethernet) that Entourage always attempts to connect to my mail and LDAP servers using the proxy and therefore I receive an Error 111: "An operation on the server timed out" message. When I add an exception to the proxy settings in the "Bypass proxy settings" section of the Proxies tab then it works fine but I find it odd that this is necessary for Entourage when other network applications have no issues (e.g. Mail and Address Book). Mind you, Java applications also seem to have the same problem as I need to set proxy exceptions for those applications as well if the server they need to connect to is inside Intranet.
With Messenger the proxy issue just means that I don't use the application at work. Applications like iChat seem to cope quite well with changing network locations and recognise that they need to use the proxy server when connected via the Ethernet adaptor and not when connected by Airport. Messenger, on the other hand, needs me to add the proxy settings in the Accounts Preferences; it does not use the settings specified in the System Network Preferences for my current network connection. When I come to work in the morning the likes of iChat happily connects to AIM but Messenger just greets me with an error message.
I hope that helps explain things but if it is still unclear then feel free to drop me an email at mpeaston@mac.com. - Anonymous
March 16, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 17, 2006
Spotlight support! Yea! That is the one thing I've been particularly wishing for. I even spent about 2 months writing my own email extraction from Office utility to I could then use Spotlight on that data.
Talk about kludgy! This is great news. Keep up the good work. - Anonymous
March 17, 2006
The MacBU was given a chance, it let it pass, so stuff you now, I'm getting as many people as I can to stop using office, or just keep there old PC version which they can use on Intel Macs, only few more months till Xen on Leopard, then the world will virtualize M$ evill 666 off the planet.
:P
You're opinions don't count, so say what you want, I really don't give a F354k. As long as just a single other Mac person reads and realizes how evil M$ is and stops using there products, the memes will spread further..... - Anonymous
March 18, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 18, 2006
No, no Asam, you misspelled "I'm on a mission from Slashdot"
If you don't like Microsoft, why do you keep commmenting here? What, nadyne's and mine are the only blogs that haven't banned you yet?
The funny thing is you talk about virtual machines...what do you think everyone wants a VM running on a Mactel for?
Linux? No, that already runs on Apple hardware. BSD? Well, that would be a rather large part of OS X.
No, they all want it for...
Windows.
So please, do evangelize Xen all you want. Because every copy of Xen used is another license of Windows sold...
By your own work, your undoing shall be built. - Anonymous
March 18, 2006
Hi John,
Sorry for the delay in responding regarding the proxy issue. Here's a rundown of how I have it setup and I hope that this helps.
My organisation employs a proxy server that is typically configured using an automatic PAC file. This is how all our Windows PCs are setup and this seems to work great with the Windows version of Messenger. For most Mac applications, the use of the "Configure proxies using a PAC file" works great but I none of the Office:mac products did (e.g. selecting a hyperlink in Word would result in an error). I eventually tripped over a post on a forum from someone who noted that Internet Explorer 5.2 also didn't use an automatic PAC configuration of the proxies and so manual configuration was necessary. Given this information I have configured proxies manually and set a proxy setting for all of the protocols available in the Network proxies panel for my Build-In Ethernet connection (e.g. FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, RTSP, SOCKS, Gopher and Automatic) on port 3128. I believe the proxy server itself is only setup to handle HTTP, FTP and HTTPS but I figured that setting all the protocols to use the proxy wouldn't hurt (I maybe about to be proven wrong on this...).
I hope that this information is of some use to you. Being able to use the "Configure proxies using a PAC file" would be the ideal solution but I'll take any suggestions that you can supply. - Anonymous
March 19, 2006
Props to MacBU for the Office update! the Spotlight integration for Entourage is much appreciated.
As for Asam, could someone...anyone...introduce him to 'Third Grade Spelling and Basic Writing 101?' - Anonymous
March 19, 2006
I'm dislickix :P and don't care :P - Anonymous
March 19, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 19, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 19, 2006
Hi John,
Just to clarify, using the "Configure proxies using a PAC file" option works great with network-aware applications such as Safari but for some reason none of the Office:mac applications will access the Internet when it is set. It is for this reason that I have had to set the proxy settings manually. I do agree that this doesn't make sense but, as noted earlier, it has been noted by others that because IE 5.2 didn't seem to support PAC files that this restriction was carried into the Office:mac applications as well. Whether this is true or not isn't something that I can confirm beyond noting that when the "Configure proxies using a PAC file" option is used, and the URL to the PAC file is specified, that Office:mac applications are unable to connect to servers outside of the local Intranet (e.g. Word to open URLs in Safari or Entourage to download images in an HTML-formatted email).
The alternative to all this is that there is something in the PAC file that Office:mac just doesn't like but that the other applications are tolerant of. A quick check of the PAC file itself shows that it consists of only a single JavaScript function and no global variables. In fact, the function doesn't contain any variables with the exception of the parameters passed to it when it is called. A copy of this file can be provided for analysis/testing purposes if this would help and that confidentiality can be assured. - Anonymous
March 20, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 20, 2006
Marcus,
It could be that the code in Office that used IE to deal with all of this just never got pulled. It's a pain, but I could see it happening, so I'm not sure that there's a more elegant solution than what you've already found. - Anonymous
March 20, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 20, 2006
Hi Hossein --
Here in the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft, we use Apple's Xcode. There are other Mac IDEs available, such as Eclipse. A good websearch should find those for you.
As for me, I prefer Macintosh. I only rarely use Windows. Thankfully, Microsoft has been writing Mac software for 20 years, so they're happy to have me as a Mac user. You'll find that most of us in the MacBU are Mac users. I've seen several folks around here wearing 'I don't do Windows' t-shirts. - Anonymous
March 20, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 20, 2006
It's very possible that there's some stuff in the older Carbon APIs that is still looking for IE, but as I don't do that level of development, I don't know. - Anonymous
March 20, 2006
A new point in Entourage that I'd actually identified a while ago but forgot after my shift over to Mail.app is the way in which it treats abbreviations such as i.e. and e.g. that I have a tendency to use in emails. What I note is that whenever I use such an abbreviation that Entourage recognises the final full stop and then automatically capitalises the first letter of the next word as it would do if I had started a new sentence. This is a minor issue but one that would be nice to have addressed since using the Undo function to undo the auto-correct is a bit annoying, although not exactly a show-stopper for me. - Anonymous
March 21, 2006
Marcus, you can fix that in E'rage in the autoformat options - Anonymous
March 21, 2006
Ah. Silly me. I didn't note the Exceptions button in the AutoCorrect panel. Thanks. - Anonymous
March 22, 2006
Actually, in 11.2.3 at any rate "g." is already one of the AutoCorrect exceptions, so this does not happen for "e.g.". I remember when it did (I think Entouarge X - some version.) It was fixed by default in Entourage 2004 - 11.0 - as best I recall.