Entourage Gains Task, Note, Category Synching with Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit is starting 2009 with a bang! The team addresses one of the glaring gaps in Microsoft Entourage, which is the mail client they offer to Mac OS X users. They’ve moved away from the WebDAV protocol with the public beta of Entourage for Exchange Web Services. Whether you know what WebDAV means or not, it’s likely more important to understand what the new client offers over the old ones.
Entourage will now synchronize Tasks, Notes and Categories with your Exchange Server; something Mac users have desired for years. The new beta mail client also resolves e-mail or invitation names in the Global Address Book without the requirement of being connected over VPN. Although I’ve moved away from my Exchange Server account and on to Gmail IMAP solutions for work and personal mail, this is exactly the type of support that makes Entourage more useful to mobile users. It was frustrating for me to miss out on Tasks or Categories with my Exchange Server. I never was much of a Notes guy though; that probably doesn’t surprise you since I don’t use an online Notebook either.
Just to bear in mind, reading the notes for this it only applies to those using Exchange 2007 with rollup 2 (I think it is) applied.
Those of us on aging Exchange 2003 infrastructures need to wait for that to be upgraded first.
Great, now let’s have the task sync for iPhone!
About time they modernize this thing. Like fishd said, though, a subset of organizations are prepared to utilize this at the moment. Enterprises upgrade in slow cycles. BUT I’ll take it.
It works!
I signed up for a Hosted Exchange account with http://www.sherweb.com moments after reading that the Entourage EWS beta was available.
I’ve successfully installed Entourage EWS on my MacBookPro, configured it with my new SherWeb hosted exchange service, used SherWeb’s webmail access and configured my iPhone to work with it too. Everything works well. Tasks and categories in Entourage are most welcome! Thank-you Microsoft!
Next I plan to configure my Treo 700wx and Outlook 2007 on my Portege M700 with the new SherWeb Hosted Exchange service. Then I will perform some tests to see how well the new Tasks and categories support works between Entourage and Outlook. I just need to get my hands on a Windows Mobile 6.1-based pda/smartphone to see how the categories support added since WM5 work out in practice.
My office’s Hosted Exchange Service is based on Exchange 2003, sadly. But hey! I’m the IT department….. heh heh.
I’ll report back. -peter
Has anyone figured out a free way to sync tasks over the air from an online source (e.g. Toodledo or Google tasks) with Pocket Outlook on a Windows Mobile phone? Kevin, I can’t remember if you’re using a winmo phone at the moment; any ideas? I am hoping Microsoft will offer this feature with their new Skybox service…so far I’ve only found this capability with a paid account from Remember thr Milk, but my inner Scotsman won’t permit me to shell out that much money for such a simple service.
I haven’t found a free way to sync cloud-based Tasks OTA; RTM is the only service I can think of and as you said, it requires a paid account.
Hell yes!