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questions for you Entourage users

  • Artikel

I've got some questions for the Entourage readers in the house ...

  1. Do you know what Project Center is?
  2. If so, do you use it? How many projects do you have? Are they short-term projects, long-term projects, or a mix?
  3. If you don't use it, why not?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 28, 2008
  1. Yes
  2. Yes, about 6-8 projects. I use it mostly for longer-term projects as short-term projects aren't usually worth the effort to setup a "project" for and do the appropriate tagging/organization. More interestingly, I more frequently use Project Center for "meta projects." By this, I mean larger swim lanes of work in my job that might comprise multiple, related projects. It is these meta-projects (or domains) that I derive the most benefit from organizing into Project Center.
  3. I can tell you ways in which I'd use Entourage more re: Project Center. I live in Entourage on a daily basis, but I also live in a hierarchical note-taking program as well to organize data/notes, etc. There is a lot of overlap between these 2 applications. Entourage could close this gap by implementing the following 2 features:

  • within the Notes section of Project Center (and the generic Notes section as well), all for nested folders of notes to organize notes into a hierarchy. The UI might look something like Mori, Soho Notes, etc. Nesting folders would be a great addition for organizing Notes.

  • extend the Notebook view of MS Word into Entourage Notes. It'd be so much more convenient for me to go into my Project Folder, create a new note, and start doing note-taking for a project using that Notebook view. thanks for your consideration.

  • Anonymous
    August 28, 2008
    1 - Yes 2 - I used to, now I have stopped :-( 3 - Well, it's sort of like Notebook view in Word. It's awesome to think that I live in Mac-only land and can pass these special Office-only features around with my Mac-only, Office-using friends -- but the reality is that I don't. I am an island of computing, surrounded by the web and Windows users. If I could somehow make those projects into mini-Sharepoint sites or integrate them with the Windows infrastructure at work so my fellow Windows users could see them without looking at me all weird, it'd be great. Until then, I'll continue to use my Entourage calendar to schedule my projects.

  • Anonymous
    August 28, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 28, 2008

  1. Yes
  2. I use it a lot for a mix of big and small, short and long term projects. I have 11 projects there right now. Some are long term (a particular customer's class of review), some OWASP materials like the current manuscript of the OWASP Guide, Coding standard and Top 10, and some come and go, like short term projects for this customer or that customer. I use tasks per project, and I schedule per project. Without that I am lost as I do not multi-task well. I use this in combination with My Day to decide on which tasks for particular projects will get done next. I use the Getting Things Done methodology for breaking down tasks and getting them done, so it works well... except for Inbox Zero. I fail miserably at Inbox Zero.
  3. Let' smodify this one to things I wish it did better. I wish it coped with large folders better as I'd have all my work under it. But at about the 100,000 file mark, Project Center is basically unusable on my Mac Book Pro. I mark mail and calender events by hand. It would be nice if there could be more custom rules in the Wizard, because not every mail from a particular recipient is destined for a particular project, and in some cases, they will be in multiple projects. Andrew
  • Anonymous
    August 28, 2008
    Nadyne -- yes, I've used the Project Center a few times. But to be honest, I didn't find it all that useful and I know many other friends who use Entourage don't use the Project Center either. Many of us use both PCs and Macs, so a feature like this which is not cross-platform compatible is a hard sell. And now that we have mobile devices such as iPhones, a feature like this that can't be supported on mobile is a concern. If we want to consider this feature on its own merit without the x-plat/mobile concerns, there are certainly some nice aspects of the Project Center, but again to be honest, it seems more like something akin to an enhanced Scrapbook. I think most folks already have a good grasp of their email, contacts and calendars and can use them natively to organize as they see fit (e.g., folders for email). So the Project to me addresses some of the shortcomings of Tasks and Notes (too linear). Unfortunately, I think the approach taken is more of a kludge versus what really should be done -- port OneNote to the Mac. OneNote is the type of app which provides for better hierarchical (and hyperlink like) organization of information. Why can't a project have a subproject, task have a subtask, note have a subnote. I hope you see where this feature starts to fail. Also, the Word Notebook feature is a weakened version of what you can get with OneNote (minus fancy formatting), and it can't be ported to Word for Windows. Here are my recommendations (David Lazar, are you listening???):
  • Ensure cross-platform compatibility with Windows versions.
  • Do anything you can to bring over OneNote for Mac.
  • Need mobile support (e.g., iPhone apps).
  • Need to be able to open/import an Outlook mailbox file.
  • Don't invest any more resources into Word Notebook layout (unless this is planned for next Word for Windows version). If you can import these files into OneNote, all the better.
  • Don't do anything else with Project Center. SERIOUSLY, ask yourselves if you think you will sell one more copy of Office for Mac because of any new Project Center feature. I doubt it.
  • Lastly, how about an Exchange-Lite similar to MobileMe for us non-corporate folks.
  • Anonymous
    August 28, 2008
  1. Somewhat - I assume it is something that groups everything (emails, tasks, etc) together that you define are related to a project (or subject I guess)
  2. No
  3. Microsoft has a fantastic tool called SharePoint which allows groups to collaborate together. I am not sure if the MacBU has heard of this magical product as Office 2008 doesn't seem to know that SharePoint exists... I wish we would stop getting features geared towards the SOHO market (like My Day and Project Centre) and your team would actually focus on providing better Exchange and SharePoint support / integration. I am sure you have heard this a zillion times though...
  • Anonymous
    August 29, 2008
  1. Yes
  2. On and off.  Manage any where from 1 to 20 projects.
  3. Integration with Exchange tasks.  I love how OneNote and Exchange can link tasks.  For that reason alone I run parallels. Entourage was far better than 2003, but 2008 did not progress enough to keep it's lead.  I hate that I can't arrange and sort to the same extent that I can in Outlook.
  • Anonymous
    August 29, 2008
  1.  I have a basic understanding of what it does, but haven't ever tried it.
  2.  No.  
  3.  My MacBook is my personal machine, so projects in that world aren't usually planned.  8-)  I like the idea of Projects, and after reading about them a few years ago, wondered why the same concept didn't exist in Windows Office.

  • Anonymous
    August 29, 2008
    Adding a comment that was emailed to me so that everything is in one place ... yes, i know what it is I am trying it. Four projects in it. Some long term, others short. Finding it overly procedural.  I like that app called 'Process' for this sort of thing

  • Anonymous
    August 29, 2008
    Can't use it. Entourage refuses to send mail through my Exchange 2007 Server. I can download mail all day, but not send. I can have my network admin do anything I want on the Exchange Server, but we can't get it to work even with help from Microsoft. Apple Mail connects, downloads and sends. I've given up on Entourage, sorry.

  • Anonymous
    August 31, 2008

  1. Yes.
  2. Somehow, I try to, but my usage is very formal.
  3. My major problem is: all my contacts are in the Exchange GAL. When I use mail, I get them through LDAP. But I can't associate my projects with LDAP contacts. Because Entourage does not cache these contacts, I don't get them when out of office either (there is no access to our AD server from outside for security reasons). The only way to deal with that is to copy contacts from LDAP to the local contact list (I do that for couple of minor projects), which may work in some cases, but not when the project should be associated with a group, not specific people. Thus, for really important projects I don't use Project Center at all.

  • Anonymous
    August 31, 2008
    This is why I am not using projects : basically, you can not assign a task to someone with deadline, delegation, status, etc... so what could have been a small workgroup tool is not allowing the basic of small group cooperation with shared resources

  • Anonymous
    August 31, 2008

No (see 3) 2. N/A 3. When I use Entourage, it's to access my Exchange account when I'm on the office Mac, and it's to correspond with my Windows-using colleagues. As a result, a feature that doesn't exist on the Windows version doesn't even get a look-in, as it wouldn't be any use in our environment. Especially when, to repeat a theme, there are lots of the Windows Office features missing from the Mac version. When there are Windows features I can't use on the Mac and I'm already having to take care to ensure compatibility with my colleagues (and my own Outlook view of my Exchange account - read: Tasks & Notes...), choosing to use yet another incompatible feature just doesn't seem worth it for me.

  • Anonymous
    September 01, 2008
  1. Yes.
  2. No.
  3. Entourage is not my organizer (nor is any other computer application) for the simple reason that I can't carry a computer around with me as easily as my Franklin Covey book and my iPhone.
  • Anonymous
    September 05, 2008
    #1 Yes, I love it. #2 Yes.  Since I have Entourage on my personal laptop I have used it for personal projects, like planning reunions, 50th anniversary projects, and coordinating a trip to California with 2 families.   The two main projects have been 6-9 month long projects.   I probably wouldn't use it on short projects.  But now that I think about it, I'd probably still use it on short projects (say less than a month) if I required tracking at least emails and files.  That's the main value of Project Center--associating emails, spreadsheets, docs, & notes.  For example, in my California Road Trip project, which otherwise is not a massive project, I had both Excel spreadsheets and emails that I could access readily.

3 N/A