Thought you should know that the latest update to Office creates MORE problems than it fixes in terms of the addition of Sync Services. You people STILL do not support your own use of categories. GoBetween, a 4-person, shoe-string software company sells a product that already does this. Why did not Microsoft just buy them out, work out a few kinks, and package it? But NOOOO.. Microsoft has to introduce a competing offering that has several bugs and shortcomings. The ONLY thing tempting is that it is FREE.
Go back to the drawing board and learn how to design better product.
MEANWHILE, for those of you thinking you can go to a Mac from a PC and use Office seamlessly, keep dreaming. Entourage makes Outlook look like a stellar and reliable software package.
If you need Outlook functionality, DO NOT CONVERT to using Mac full time. It is not solid, and I doubt it ever will be.
LETTER FROM MARK/SPACE (Makers of the “The Missing Sync for PocketPC)
Last week, Microsoft released a much-anticipated update to Office
2004 for Mac OS X, which includes some new features for Entourage.
Most notably, this update adds Spotlight searching and Sync Services
support to Entourage.
Sync Services is a synchronization component that Apple introduced in
Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger". Essentially, Sync Services provides a
centralized database for common types of information, including
contacts, calendar events and tasks. Tiger's Address Book and iCal
applications are constantly syncing their data in the background with
the Sync Services database.
All current Missing Sync products use Sync Services to synchronize
with supported handheld devices. Instead of syncing with Tiger's
Address Book application, your PDA's or smartphone's contacts are
synchronized directly with the Sync Services database. The same is
true with calendar information.
The huge advantage to interfacing with Sync Services is that we can
synchronize with information from other applications that use this
technology. Chronos Organizer gained support for Sync Services
earlier this year, and Microsoft has just done the same with
Entourage. Now, Entourage users can synchronize information through
Apple's .Mac service and other Sync Services clients, like The
Missing Sync.
However, depending on the way you work, you may view how Entourage
passes category data to Sync Services as limiting.
No category information is passed to Sync Services for Entourage's
address book contacts. All contacts sync back and forth through Sync
Services to Tiger's Address Book application and Entourage, but
Entourage category and information is not shared.
Similarly, Entourage does not synchronize any calendar event or task
categories with Sync Services. Instead, all events and tasks from
Entourage are given a category of "Entourage" when they are sent to
the Sync Services database. This means that events labeled as "Home"
or "Work" in Entourage won't appear in the "Home" or "Work" calendars
in iCal; they will show up in a single calendar called "Entourage".
Likewise, only events and tasks added to iCal's "Entourage" calendar
will sync back to Entourage.
Depending on which edition of The Missing Sync you work with, this
Entourage update may open up additional synchronization options