For what it's worth, given that nobody piped up with any dire warnings or caveats, I installed the Entourage Conduit and synced (after of course syncing with Palm Desktop one more time for backup). I thought I would pass along my experiences in case anybody else decides to do what I did, which is abandon the Palm Desktop given that Palm seems to be doing the same, and it's buggy on 10.3. There are a few suggestions for the Entourage team at the end.
Syncing with Entourage worked great, with one minor annoyance (see below)! The only part of the process that involved any effort was merging my Entourage address book (which was primarily just email addresses for people) with my Palm address book (which was much heavier on phone numbers and postal addresses). Turned out to be worthwhile anyway because I had a surprising amount of stale info in both databases. I did have one user error in that process, though. Since my Palm address book was much more complete than Entourage's, I dragged all my Entourage contacts to a (temporary) Finder folder and set the conduit to just over-write the address book with the data from the handheld. The plan was to just go through the exported V-Cards and drag back in any that were not reflected in the Palm database, or udpate email addresses where needed. Except that I screwed up and set the conduit up the other way, wiping out the Palm. This is where I was happy that I had done that back-up sync with Palm Desktop. Quick conduit shuffle, restore, shuffle, and do it right this time. Lessons: be sure to back up, and read those conduit options carefully. Now, the problem/annoyance: I hadn't recently flushed old "events" from my Palm calendar. I had about a year's worth of old data. As the sync progressed, I got 318 (!!) Entourage event notifications, all of which of course were long overdue. Not a disaster -- I muted the sound and waited for the numbers to stop piling up, then did a "Dismiss all". People considering the switch should probably at least prune their old events. I think I would classify this as a bug. Now that I'm using Entourage's calendar, I finally understand why you can open multiple Main Windows! Cool. Couple of suggestions for the Entourage team: 1) There are fields in my Entourage data that I would like very much to sync onto the Palm. For example, spouse names (which I had as a custom field on Palm Desktop), and birthdays. It would be very nice to be able to map these into Palm custom fields or have them added as notes on the contact. 2) Would you please consider having an "other" item on the Snooze menu, to set a different snooze time from the ones pre-set. 3) I looked at iCal briefly, and it was not nearly as mature as Entourage. One thing I really liked about it though was the animated ringing clock icon in the window. I put the little alert window off to the side (THANK YOU for making it movable) so that it doesn't interrupt my work if it pops up when I happen to be in mid-sentence or something. If I'm not around when the alert pops up (so that I miss the beep), it would be nice to have something catch the eye when I come back to the computer. Anyway, so far, looks pretty darned good. Best, --Mike > On 2/12/04 7:24 AM, "Judi Sohn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> I saw. Someone reporting that someone else "made it clear" only makes it >> clear to me that the exact words were never said. I highly doubt that Palm >> would completely abandon the Mac user. They may no longer develop the Hot >> Sync/PIM but that doesn't mean that they won't support us or put something >> we can use in the box. > > Most likely, what they will put in the box is a reference to "The Missing > Sync." And it is not unlikely that, given the incentive to make something > good enough to sell, this third party software will be more frequently > updated and more functional than what Palm might have written. > > The good news is, without a desktop Palm PIM, either Entourage or Apple's > own iCal/ Address Book combination will become de facto standard PIM. We > should not expect that Palm would by itself develop a great PIM for the Mac, > when even people with PC's sync to many other programs and the Palm Desktop > is not the favored program. -- Howard Dean for President http://www.deanforamerica.com -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
