I¹ve been using Entourage 2008 for a few weeks now, and I must state my deep disappointment.
I know I¹ll be bombarded by apologists telling me that it must be something in my computer or my software because no one else is having ANY problems with this majestic work of art. But I was expecting a performance boost from the UB version of Entourage, and have seen the exact opposite. For the attempted nit-pickers, I¹m using a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 3GB of RAM and 150 GB hard drive less than half full, running OS X 10.4.11 with no haxies. Entourage has gone from being my favorite program to sheer drudgery. It¹s no joke that an Entourage operation consists of ³click and count to 5². There is a serious delay before executing virtually any operation in Entourage. The behavior of the scroll wheel and the scroll feature on the touch pad when reading messages are at best unreliable and frequently just non-functional. The ³cosmetic improvements² look like they were handed off by the lauded MBU people to the color-blind and tasteless Windows graphics designers. And the decision to abandon Treo users to the vagaries of multi-layered Sync-Services-based synchronization is just about the most offensive applications software decision I¹ve encountered in 40 years in the computer industry. For a few years now I¹ve endured endless questions from other Mac users about why I¹ve stuck with Entourage instead of Apple Mail, Calendar and Address Book. My answers have focused on superior features, flexibility and Treo synchronization. The features and flexibility, along with the aesthetics of the user interface, have now been overcome by the sluggish performance and the garish design, while the lack of a Palm conduit has now made using a Treo MUCH less desirable with Entourage than with the Apple apps. (Y¹all can argue taste and individual preferences and performance all you want, but no intelligent person can hope to claim that the new Treo synch process is even remotely preferable to the old way). So I suspect that the performance issues, which will be hotly denied in responses to this email, will eventually be fixed, even though they didn¹t exist. And the color schemes, font choices and other aesthetic elements will get worse and better at random for the sake of change alone. (Does anyone beside me have to do a double take when clicking on the ³Window² menu to figure out which window to select?). But unless there¹s a Palm conduit in the offing, and it appears there will not be, I¹m going to be forced to use the Apple apps if for no other reason than accurate and reliable synchronization with my PDA. And oh yeah. The Apple apps are MUCH quicker. This list has been very helpful over the years, and I admire the hardworking people in the MBU and on this list who have kept the Mac alive by providing software compatible with the main Windows apps for business. But this latest upgrade should have been a major improvement, at least in speed, especially for the price, and I¹ve found it to be anything but. Barry
