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Our Blogs Core Dump Microsoft Office 2008: first look
Our Blogs Core Dump Microsoft Office 2008: first look | Microsoft Office 2008: first look |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Monday, 21 January 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 5 EntourageFeatured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
The two main things that needed manual intervention were rules and account passwords. For some reason, mail handling rules (eg, automatically filing messages sent from a particular address) were preserved and enabled, but didn't take effect until I edited them. Email account passwords are stored in the Mac OS X keychain, and as Entourage 2008 is a separate program to Entourage 2004, they had to be re-entered the first time I tried to receive emails. My habit is to have at least two Mail windows open - one for the Inbox, and one or two to show other folders - and it took a while to get used to the names showing in the Windows menu as (eg) "Inbox - Folders on My Computer" and "Sent Item - Folders on My Computer" rather than "Mail" and "Mail 2". It's different, but it is better. One thing Microsoft hasn't fixed is that not all windows are automatically re-opened each time you launch the program. Imagine Entourage was displaying the Inbox, Calendar and three emails when you quit the program. The next time you run it, Inbox and Calendar will appear, but not the messages. Another is that if you switch one window between the Inbox and the Calendar and back again, you lose your position in the Inbox. Instead, you're back at the top. This is inconvenient if, like me, you prefer to keep the Inbox sorted by message status rather than date sent. On the other hand, you can now use the backspace key to delete HTML messages, something that previously worked only with plain-text emails. Those of us who maintain a large number of message folders will be pleased by a new feature that lets you drag a folder (or view) into a shortcut bar beneath a main window's toolbar, thus providing quick access to those that are most frequently used. Microsoft made a big deal about "managing time and tasks more efficiently", but any scheduled tasks for the day don't show up in the To Do list. Instead, you must view the Calendar and display the To Do list next to it. If you spend more time in the Calendar than I do, that might not be so much of a problem. The saving grace is My Day, a small independent application that displays upcoming events and current To Do items in a floating window. You can use it to create a new To Do, but not a new event. The junk mail protection is supposed to be improved, but I haven't been using the new version long enough to form an opinion. As an experiment, I've disabled the external spam filter that I was running alongside Entourage 2004, as its junk mail protection wasn't up to the job. There seems to be a problem with the notification sounds. I normally have them all disabled, but when I tried activating them they worked once and then stopped. Most of the other changes in Entourage relate to Exchange compatibility, but as I don't use an Exchange server they are wasted on me. |
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