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Tips and Reports
Last updated December 10, 2008
Microsoft Outlook has traditionally been the Windows and Macintosh client for Microsoft's Exchange Server for e-mail and calendar functions. However, Microsoft never created a Mac OS X version of Outlook. The most recent version of Outlook for Mac, Outlook 2001, runs in Mac OS X's Classic mode. In 2001, Microsoft announced that it would transfer the responsibility for its Mac Exchange client from its Exchange group to the Macintosh Business Unit, the group that created Microsoft Office X. In February 2003, Microsoft announced that MBU decided to drop Outlook for Mac, and instead integrate functionality into the Entourage email/scheduling/contacts application.
For more info, see visit Microsoft's Entourage page.
Microsoft hints at time zone fix in new Entourage update. Wednesday, December 10, 2008 -- In updates to Office 2008 and 2004 this week, Microsoft alluded to an Entourage time zone fix that may (or may not) address reported problems involving time zones. There are two such issues: the "Casablanca" time zone problem with sync services, and the time zone problems with printing calendars. For Entourage, Microsoft simply said that the new version "provides updated time zone information." If you've had these problems, if these updates address them. Microsoft also said it fixed a Word bug that could cause a problem when moving a file to Windows.
Microsoft released Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.5 Update, Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.3 Update, and Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0.2, which converts the newer file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) to the older formats. The company said that all three updates improve stability, performance, and security, specifically "vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code."
In Office 2004, the updates fix problems with Word and Excel unexpectedly quitting. Office 2008 has a bigger list of bug fixes, including an issue saving files in the older .doc format (Word 97-2004 format) that are moved to Windows. Microsoft said that "this update fixes an issue that causes some formatting issues when you save a Word document in the Word 97-2004 format and then reopen it in Word 2003 for Windows."
All three updates are available through the Office AutoUpdate feature or at the Microsoft Mactopia site.
Office Mac updates for stability and Entourage bugs; Open XML Converter also updated. Thursday, October 16, 2008 -- Microsoft has issued updates for Office, the Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.3 Update and the Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.2 Update. While the version for Office 2004 is mostly a security update, the Office 2008 update address reliability and stability and some Entourage/Exchange bugs, as well as security. All of the other Office apps were updated.
Office 2008 12.1.3 fixes a problem with Entourage and Exchange 2007 caused by the previous 12.1.2 update. When connecting to the server with a secure connection, an error message would appear saying that the "server name or IP address does not match the name or IP address on the server's certificate."
Several other Entourage bugs are fixed, including a problem with calendar events being duplicated in Outlook Web Access or in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. Another issue involves the Entourage Account Setup Assistant, which has improved handling of SSL and Autodiscover of Public Folders.
In addition, Microsoft updated Open XML Converter to version 1.0.1. The Converter can translate Open XML files (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx) created in Office 2008 for Mac or Office 2007 for Windows. Open XML Converter converts the files to the older .doc, .ppt, and .xls formats. The update adds enhancements for stability, performance, and security, according to Microsoft.
If you've used these updates
Entourage 2008 adds kerberos and increased Exchange compatibility. Tuesday, January 15, 2008 -- Entourage 2008 can use kerberos to authenticate to Active Directory for single sign on and can authenticate to Exchange Server's global address list (GAL). Previous versions of Entourage could not be part of Active Directory single sign-ons. (The included Messenger for Mac 6.0, which is not new, also enables users to add contacts from the GAL to the Messenger contacts list.)
Entourage can take advantage of more of Exchange Server's features. Exchange 2007-compatible resource booking allows Entourage 2008 users to book rooms in a simple manner and without adding overhead to Entourage. A new Out of Office (OOF) Assistant enables users to set up their Exchange account to send a custom auto-reply message. Microsoft also said that calendar management actions such as Accept and Decline are more consistent with Outlook.
Click here for more on Entourage 2008.
Microsoft releases Office Mac 11.3.7 Update. August 21, 2007 -- Last week, Microsoft released Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.7 Update, which the company says fixes security and stability issues. Computerworld has a description of the security updates.
Office 11.3.6 Update fixes Entourage/Exchange folder bug. July 18, 2007 -- Microsoft has released Office 2004 11.3.6 Update aimed at Entourage and Excel. The update fixes an Entourage 2004 problem with Exchange Server. From the Readme file:
Microsoft Exchange public folder data loss issue is fixed: This update fixes an issue that causes data loss when public folder users who have a permission level of "Editor" or greater use Entourage to empty the cache for all public folders on the server running Exchange Server.
The update also plugs a security hole that left Excel 2004 vulnerable to an attack that could overwrite the Mac memory with malicious code.
Microsoft said that the previous update, 11.3.5, should be installed before 11.3.6.
If you've tried the Entourage 11.3.6 if it fixes (or causes) and problems, such as those listed on our Entourage/Exchange Tips and Reports page.
Office/Entourage 11.3.5 update focuses on security. May 9, 2007 -- Yesterday, Microsoft released Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.5 Update, a free download that adds security fixes for Entourage, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Microsoft describes the fix:
This update contains sevesral improvements to enhance security and stability, including fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code. In addition, this update includes all the improvements released in all previous Office 2004 updates.
The developer of E2sync said yesterday that Entourage 11.3.5 also includes changes to its sync services that improve syncing. E2sync is a utility that can sync Entourage with iSync, moving Entourage contacts, calendar items and tasks to over 60 cell phone models, iPods and PDAs, and to iCal, AddressBook, and .Mac.
If you’ve seen the update positively or negatively effect Entourage and Exchange Server
Office 2004 11.3.4 security update released. March 5, 2007 -- Microsoft last month released security update 11.3.4 for Office 2004, including Entourage, version 11.3.4. Microsoft describes it:
This update contains several improvements to enhance security and stability, including fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code.
Microsoft releases Office 2004 Update 11.2.4. June 14, 2006 -- Yesterday, Microsoft released Office 2004 for Mac Update 11.2.4. The update includes security improvements as well as other types of fixes for Entourage 2004 and PowerPoint 2004.
Microsoft warns that this update could cause data loss in certain situations with Entourage SP2 11.2.0. The website suggests some measures to take to prevent this problem.
( if this update addresses some of the recent problems we’ve reported on our Entourage/Exchange reports page.)
A Microsoft spokesperson also said that the company will be releasing two more updates over the next month: Office 2004 Update 11.2.5 and, for the older version of Office, Office X Update 10.1.7.
Version 2 of Exchange KB 911829 update may fix the Entourage problems. June 5, 2006 -- Microsoft has issued Version 2 of the KB 911829 patch for Exchange Server. The first version of the KB 911829 patch caused a problem with Entourage where users can’t see updates to recurring calendar events. It also causes a problem where Entourage users receive blank email messages.Office 11.2.3 Update adds Entourage Sync Services.March 15, 2006 -- Microsoft released Office 2004 for Mac 11.2.3, an update to the suite for Mac OS X. The update features improvements to Entourage and to Messenger for Mac. New features in Entourage include:
Messenger for Mac 5.1 improves use with Live Communications Server, including:
MS Office 11.2.1 patch aimed at fixing Entourage SP2. October 21, 2005 -- Yesterday, Microsoft released Office 2004 for Mac 11.2.1 Update to fix problems with the recently released Entourage SP2, which we've previously reported. Microsoft "strongly recommends" that all Entourage SP2 users install the new update.
The company said that the 11.2.1 Update fixes a bug that could cause data loss when Entourage SP2 tries to synchronize with an Exchange mailbox that was moved to a different Exchange server. It also fixes problems with setting Exchange server permissions and with printing calendars.
Office 2004 SP2 fills holes in Entourage/Exchange functionality; Server patch also issed. September 23, 2005 -- Office 2004 Service Pack 2 for Mac OS X, a free update, focuses on improving Entourage's functionality as an Exchange client. Microsoft also issued an update for Exchange Server to support Entourage. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint received bug fixes and minor improvements. Among the improvement in Entourage 2004 SP2:
See this eWeek report for more.
March 29, 2005 -- Microsoft has posted the .PST Import Tool for Entourage 2004 as a free download. The PST Import Tool helps users more migrate data from Outlook 2001 for Mac to Entourage 2004. Microsoft first announced the tool in January.
Office 10.1.5 update. Released on September 3, 2003, the Microsoft Office v. X 10.1.5 Update "addresses several stability issues with PowerPoint®, Excel, and Visual Basic for Applications for Office v. X."
Microsoft Exchange Update for Entourage X (Office v. X 10.1.4 Update). Released August 4, 2003, this the official name of the first Entourage version to act as client for Exchange Server. The 10.1.4 update is free from Microsoft, 28.6 MB in size. The update has several requirements:
The Exchange features added to Entourage 10.1.4 include:
The biggest change from Outlook is that Entourage X v10.1.4 does not support the native Exchange MAPI protocol for calendar and address book connectivity. The MAPI protocol is used by the Exchange for calendar and address book functions in Outlook for Windows and in Outlook 2001 for Mac OS 9. Entourage X v10.1.4 instead it uses the WebDAV protocol, based on html. When the update was released, we asked Microsoft about it the lack of MAPI in Entourage, and received this reply:
This version of Exchange does not support MAPI. Through working with our customers and the Exchange team, we determined that adding calendar and address book support through WebDAV was the most efficient and timely way to meet our customers' needs. Entourage X supports IMAP protocol for accessing email from the Exchange server and will continue this support.
In addition, Microsoft said that the upgrade has other benefits not related to Exchange Server. From the Microsoft web site:
As an added benefit, all Office X for Mac customers should download this free update (even if they don't get their e-mail from an Exchange Server) to experience enhancements to Word X, PowerPoint X and Excel X.
Topics include:
Reader reviews--Lack of MAPI support and other features found in Outlook 2001
The lack of MAPI support in the Microsoft Exchange Update for Entourage X is an important issue for many readers. The MAPI protocol is used by the Exchange for calendar and address book functions in Outlook for Windows and in Outlook 2001 for Mac OS 9. A number of readers also complained about the lack of MAPI and other features found in Outlook 2001. Other readers were more optimistic, noting the positive aspects of the new version, and hoping that Microsoft will build on these in a future release.
August 6, 2003
Brian Little explains why some sites need MAPI support :
I just want to emphasize to Microsoft that this is _not_ an appropriate tool for the enterprise. It requires IMAP, and does not speak Microsoft's proprietary MAPI protocol, as required by many server admins who refuse to enable POP or IMAP. Further, the address-book-via-LDAP scheme is useless to those of us without a usable LDAP setup.In short, this "upgrade" makes a lot of invalid assumptions about what the end user is going to be getting from the back end ... Until we get MAPI, at the very least, we're stuck with 2001.
August 6, 2003
John Lockwood points out some of the features lacking in the new Entourage:
For those who don't know, Entourage X 10.1.4 is _not_ a MAPI client (like Outlook for Windows or even Outlook 2001 for Mac OS 9). Entourage X 10.1.4 instead relies heavily on using OWA (Outlook Web Access) -- this is definite ... This fact by itself would not be enough to condemn this application but it is certainly a bad start. None of the reports I have seen indicate ANYONE has successfully been able to use the Calendar feature.Furthermore, Entourage X 10.1.4 has only a fraction of the features of Outlook 2001 (for Mac OS 9) which in turn only has a fraction of the features of Outlook for Windows.
Critical features that appear to be missing include (but not limited to):
- .PST file support,
- Archiving support,
- Shared mailboxes.
Does anyone know if Entourage X 10.1.4 copes with TNEF attachments (from Outlook for Windows clients, also known as the dreaded WINMAIL.DAT problem)?
August 6, 2003
Dr. Michael J. Modesitt also notes the lack of features, but is less pessimistic:
I have noticed several problems for what should be referred to as a beta program:
- There are no delegation capabilities
- Tasks do not synchronize (entourage to exchange)
- Importing holidays cause major problems with syncing calendars
- Calendar synchronizing is typically delayed many minutes
- Calendar items that are dragged from one date to another do not sync properly; however you can edit the date and time manually, save it and it gets sync'd.
On the other hand, once I sorted out my server addresses for email/calendar (IMAP) and the busy/free server/directory. I could sync with my Palm, Entourage and Exchange server successfully. I could also busy search attendees for meeting requests. This is a good start.
August 6, 2003
Jon Armstrong:
The upgrade is nothing more than using IMAP to get access to Exchange. If your admins don't feel like implementing IMAP, you are screwed.Like previous posters, my feelings are that this isn't a true Exchange client. If you had IMAP activated on your Exchange server, the previous version of Entourage would work to get messages. This seems to be a case of marketing selling something that doesn't really exist: A true Mac OS X Exchange client.
I wrote a rant at Blurbomat. After 2.5 hours of trying to get it to work, I gave up and used a PII laptop and Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection tool to control the laptop via OS X.
August 6, 2003
Michael Morris:
Entourage for Exchange is an incomplete solution. It is not what it was hyped it to be. Our Exchange servers only support the MAPI protocol and since EDS runs things, they refuse to support anything else. I'm still stuck with Outlook 2001...
August 7, 2003
Tom Hesser is more optimistic:
I have been eagerly awaiting the 'so-called' Exchange compliant version of Entourage. While the 10.1.4 update would be an adequate short term measure, it really is not appropriate for use at a large company that is making full use of Exchange's features in a mixed platform environment. I have been following the thread on MacWindows about this and I fall somewhere in the middle on the opinion board. I agree this is not a true Enterprise solution in it's current form, and seems to indicate in Entourage Help that it only synchronizes "local" or "top-level" items."Only Calendar items stored in the top level of your Outlook Calendar folder are synchronized. Calendar items stored in subfolders or anywhere else are not synchronized."
The company I work for makes extensive use of public/shared calendars. While I had NO problems connecting to and synchronizing my mail, contacts, and PERSONAL calendar with our Exchange server, there is no way to look at public calendars. I can look at Exchange Public Folders, and I "see" the public calendars, but Entourage will display events as simply a list of email messages. This was a key feature we need here to consolidate our calendaring between Macs and PCs on Os X. Now we are stuck using Classic (2001) which lacks MANY modern email features.
So, it IS a step in the right direction, and worked fine during my setup (I am in charge of testing Outlook on the Mac...among other things). We are having trouble with LDAP in OS X apps, so getting the addresses from Exchange helps, and well as migrating personal address books. We are already using IMAP on Exchange, but we would prefer MAPI. It doesn't meet our large scale needs right now, but maybe the MBU is still working on better integration.
As for Palm Desktop, the update did not seem to affect the Handspring version of Palm Desktop 4.0 on my machine.
August 7, 2003
Jonathan Shmoolie:
[Exchange X 10.1.4] won't work for our company and I suspect it won't work for many more company's like ours. First of all it is not a real Exchange client. It doesn't provide full-time connectivity to the Exchange server, does not allow for access to pst files (very, very important), or to public folders. It won't work with Exchange 5.5 - it requires 2000 or 2003 both of which require Active Directory.We need a real OS X Exchange client from Microsoft so that our hundreds of Mac users can keep pace with our thousands of Windows users. I hope that someone at Microsoft is listening.
August 7, 2003
Marc Hamilton:
Like many others I waited with cheerful anticipation for the arrival of the Entourage X Exchange update. The absolute most important feature I need is the Calendar syncing. Shame on Microsoft for being so disingenuous toward the Mac community. It was back to Outlook 2001, the last OS 9 holdout since I migrated to Quark 6.0. I remain hopeful that there will be a fix to MAPI support issue.
August 8, 2003
Susan Patton sent us a detailed review of the new Exchange client:
I have been using Entourage 10.1.4 since Monday. I am trying to have a positive attitude towards its shortcomings compared to Outlook 2001. However, I am not sure that Entourage is going to be a viable solution in our corporate environment. There are some things I'm happy to see.We have over 100 Mac users and we are about 75 percent migrated to OS X. I am evaluating the features of Entourage 10.1.4 to determine what is different or missing so that we can make a decision about whether this solution will work for us or if we are better sticking with Outlook 2001.
On the positive side obviously it is nice to be able to abandon Classic. I'm delighted to be able to read HTML messages. I do not seem to be having the same calendar issues others have reported.
Shortcomings in my opinion are many. They include:
-- Lack of MAPI support. This is obviously not a true Exchange client. The first time a folder or the In Box is accessed it has to sync. This can take a considerable length of time. For the end user this will be unacceptable.
-- Lack of .pst support. I moved my own personal folders to folders in "On My Computer". I don't have all that many messages in the .pst file and it took FOREVER. I had to first move each folder of messages from my .pst file into my Outlook In Box then Receive a Complete Folder List in Entourage. Next I had to go into each folder moved to the In Box and wait for the messages to sync. It took a LONG time for each folder to sync, especially for messages with attachments. Then I could move the folder to my On My Computer folder. Lastly I had to go back into Outlook and delete the folder I had moved from my .pst file. At any rate the thought of performing this task on 100+ Outlook 2001 users is daunting to say the least. Many of these users have huge numbers of messages in personal folders.
-- Although I can set up a second account to be able to see another user's In Box I have to set up a second identity and switch identities to be able to see the other mailbox calendar. We have a number of Administrative Assistants using Macs who manage their bosses calendars. This will be an issue.
-- I haven't figured out how to get a Read Receipt for read mail. A number of people use this feature religiously.
-- I can search the Global Address List but not browse it.
-- Entourage seems slow to respond to typing.
-- There are Rules but no Out of Office wizard.
There may be other issues that I haven't found yet. Overall I'm disappointed with what Microsoft has given us in this release. But as I said I'm trying to look for the positives and to determine if there are work arounds or solutions to the issues I've identified so far.
August 5, 2003
Todd Barber verifies that the new Entourage does not work with Exchange Server 5.5:
I installed it anyway and I can only retrieve my mail (Exchange 5.5), I can not send it. Entourage was designed for POP mail and therefore it downloads all of your mail to a local database file (your mail and calendar records). This has not changed with the update. The records for Exchange (email, calendar entries,etc.) must be downloaded to your local Entourage database in order to view them. Then there is a synchronization that takes place to see if your local records match the Exchange server.Entourage was never designed as an Exchange server client and it's still not. If you are just sitting there in you inbox you're not going to see your new mail instantly, only when it decides to try to synchronize on it's own or when you click the Send and Receive mail button.
September 23, 2003
Michael Backlund
Went to your page last night and saw a report that said Entourage X 10.1.5 won't work with Exchange 5.5 ... I am composing this email with just that configuration. I have applied Service Pack 4 to my Exchange Server and I have updated Entourage to version 10.1.5 so the user who posted the incompatibility may wish to try applying the patch to his Exchange server.
Backlund didn't mention if he can use any calendar functions.
August 5, 2003
Evan Williams can't get calendaring to work:
I've read through all of the MS docs on how to configure Entourage to work with an Exchange server and I still can't get the calendaring to work (Free/Busy data not found, error -3170 OR error -3248). Sending and receiving mail works, Public Folders are visible, I can search the Global Address List through the LDAP service, but no calendar.We are running MS Exchange 2000 SP2. We meet all of the MS requirements for Entourage to work with the server (IMAP4, SMTP, Outlook Web Access--OWA, and LDAP are all running on the server) so I'm not sure what it is.
I've tried reducing the authentication settings to the lowest possible thinking maybe it was a SSL/authentication problem, I've compared all the port/security settings between the Entourage client and the Exchange 2k System Manager and they all match up.
Anyone have any ideas? The only thing I can think of is that we ran the MS IIS Lockdown tool and maybe that disabled some part of the WebDAV protocol that the Entourage calendar needs. Can anyone confirm this? Also, the error -3170 occurs if I'm trying to invite someone w/ an Exchange mailbox to a meeting, the error -3248 is if I'm trying to invite someone with an outside email address. But this isn't even consistent.
August 5, 2003
Brennan Pang can't book resources:
I've tried the new Office/Entourage update and it seems to work decently with our Exchange 2000 server but I have yet to figure out a way to book resources. We use resource booking to book all of our conference rooms when we create a meeting request in Outlook on Windows or Outlook 2001 Mac. This functionality is critical and doesn't appear to be enabled by this update. I'd love to know if any readers have figured this out. I hope I'm just overlooking something here.
August 6, 2003
David Rienzo:
I'm also having a similar problem with the new Entourage. Email works absolutely perfectly, and I'm able to access all the folders I've created using Outlook for the PC. When I use Entourage, though, I am unable to synch my calendar or contacts with the Exchange server. They do show up as folder items, however, in the sidebar.We are running Exchange 2k, SP3 installed, OWA is enabled. I don't know if webDAV is enabled.
August 7, 2003
Evan Mati:
We have Exchange and the new update allows us to receive email but not send it. I have tried to set it up different ways and also just like our Windows clients.I guess I'll have to wait for Panther's Mail Exchange implementation.
Microsoft should give us a better solution. I paid more for my New Office v.X then I paid for my Dell.
Suggestions for getting Entourage working with Exchange
August 6, 2003
Barry Shapiro has a suggestion for people having problems:
Installed the update Monday. We just got it working now. There were some initial problems setting up my account. These all seamed to point to some settings on the server side. If you have problems I suggest trying a temp user on the exchange server to debug possible errors on the windows side.Once these problems were corrected every thing seams to work OK. There are some differences in the way things are done in Entourage compared to Outlook that you need to get used to. I found that you need to set the rules for send and receive mail to a schedule or time interval if you want your mail current. Otherwise the default is to manually send and receive. My contacts show up but I don't yet know how to add or edit them.
Overall this appears to be a much improved Mail application compared to Outlook 2001 which would not render images and or work with hot links in a message.
August 7, 2003
Sebastian Wohlrapp sent in some advice for configuring shared calendars with the new Exchange-enabled Entourage released this week:
The settings for participating in shared calendars are a bit tricky compared to the ones on the windows world client Outlook. If you do not use an external free/busy-server or -service set the string for free/busy-server toexchangeserver-ip/public/
e.g. 192.168.0.1/public/
/public/ seems to be the default location but might vary depending on the settings your admin will know about.
With this, Entourage becomes a fully usable Outlook substitute and relieves me from having to work with Windows.
March 23, 2006
Frederic Boldireff Vauhallan in France
I have this problem of the error message "A secure connection cannot be established because the correct root certificate is not installed" appearing in Entourage (11.2.3) when I try to connect to the Exchange server of my employer. This problem appeared with the recent upgrade of their Exchange server. They used to run Exchange Server 5.5; it is now Outlook Web Access (or Exchange Server 6.5). I have contacted the IT department, but they are not willing to help. I have tried all possible tricks, but no joy. It seems I would need to provide Keychain with a Personal Information Exchange certificate (.pfx) that my IT department will not give away.
If you've seen this problem
August 8, 2003
Will Jorgensen mentions a problem with Activity directory, and a problem with duplicate messages:
Here are some problems I've notices with the Entourage 10.1.4 update.The first reason why this shouldn't have been released yet is the fact that it locks my Active Directory account out after one bad attempt. It apparently tries your password a number of times (>5 cause that is how many bad attempts we get before getting locked out).
Another problem which is mostly just annoying is that every new message seems to come to my mailbox twice. I do have rules that were set up using outlook on windows that could have something to do with it but it is annoying. The fact that it can't find our free busy server is going to make it a nightmare to support for our Mac users. However I think the entourage update is the right first step. It turns out that the new version of outlook will be dropping support for MAPI as well and it will essentially work on a local copy of the emails. It will however act like MAPI in that it will pull a message down as soon as it comes to the mailbox.
I think Entourage was written the way it was so that in the future it will work better even though for now it has many drawbacks. I encourage every one to contact Microsoft about their issues so that they understand how many of us need things like personal folder support and group mailboxes.
If you've seen these problems, please let us know.
Entourage 10.1.4 update affects Word, PowerPoint.
As was mentioned above, the Entourage X 10.1.4 update also made some changes to other Office applications. Readers have reported the update causing problems with
Problems opening Word 10.1.4
August 18, 2003
Michael Wilmar finds Word files are no longer double-clickable:
Since I downloaded the most recent update of Word with Entourage for Exchange Server, I find that, from time to time, I cannot open Word documents created in WinWord except from within Word. In other words, double clicking on the icon doesn't open the document.
August 18, 2003
Don Crowell also has a Word problem:
I installed the update, and now I can't get Word to open. Excel and PowerPoint open fine, but Word gives a message that Word has unexpectedly ended.
August 21, 2003
Bruce Bowden confirms the problem of double-clicking Word files:
I was also having a problem with double-clicking on Word files. Nothing would happen except that Word became the active application. I had to go to Word's File menu to open the document. This only happened when Word was already running. If Word wasn't running double-clicking on a Word document always worked.This was happening before the office 10.1.4 update while running Mac OS 10.2.6. Since then I have had to reinstall my system and drop back to 10.2.4. Word has behaved itself since both before and after the Office 10.1.4 update, probably due to the system reinstall rather than particular system versions.
August 18, 2003
Rich Tanksley has seen multiple instances of PowerPoint problems:
We've got a few clients that updated Office X to 10.1.4 so they could use Entourage. 10.1.4 includes some fixes to PowerPoint also. Since the update, PowerPoint crashes often. Just locks up with a spinning color wheel.You can duplicate the problem by opening a new document, inserting a picture as a background. Putting an image on top of it, then going back and changing the background to the green marble background included with PowerPoint.
This locks up two different machines with the 10.1.4 update. Before the update, they worked fine.
We have reinstalled Office, trashed the prefs, etc.
August 21, 2003
Richard Rodriguez is seeing a problem with PowerPoint quitting:
I too am having problems with PowerPoint. Although it doesn't lock up like some of the other readers describe, it unexpectedly quits on me. I haven't been able to duplicate the problem, but it seems to be similar to what others have described after choosing a background. A couple of times, the first background selection caused it to quit, while other times it quits after adding a new slide.One of the reasons I switched to Mac was because of so many problems with Windows, and MS Office for Windows. Now, I'm wishing that I hadn't bought Office for Mac.
If you've seen any of these problems, please let us know.
Suggestions of auto-quitting problems
August 21, 2003
Patrick Ellis has a general suggestion:
I count myself lucky that I have not experienced the crashes in Office following the application of the 10.1.4 update. I did, however, experience regular "the application has unexpectedly quit" errors with Office prior to updating. I ran fsck but no problems were reported. Reinstalling the package and trashing the personal preferences didn't help.That being said, my crashes were resolved after trashing the Microsoft User Data folder that resides inside the Documents folder of my home library. I can't say for sure that this will resolve your readers' issues that occurred following the update but trashing the user preferences and this specific folder may be worth a try.
August 21, 2003
Andrew Hendrycks also has a suggestion for dealing with these problems:
I am not saying this is in any way related to the issues that some are having with Office apps crashing or even failing to launch at all.But, what I have worked with on a constant basis as a System Administrator for 10 years is that fonts cause the most amount of grief. At the first sign of major application issues I go directly to my font folder(s) and check the Creation Date of all fonts.
As a general rule I will remove any font over 4-5 years old and then check the apps again.
Microsoft has many times in the past been one of the most stringent in regards to having their apps "check" fonts at launch time. If it finds any it doesn't like it tends to "crash". I wish they would offer a better error message than that, but hey Ö what can you do.
People should check their fonts on a more regular basis as old fonts WILL cause major system headaches. It may also directly help these Office issues.
August 21, 2003
A reader (who did not give his name) reports this issue with Excel:
Copying from Excel and pasting in Mail.app causes both applications to hang with the spinning beach ball.
August 21, 2003
Xavier Jubier reports a problem with all Office apps:
Since I updated, when I try to quit any of the MS Office apps I get the spinning wheel. The only way to quit is to do a force quit!
If you've seen these problems with 10.1.4, please let us know.
Office X 10.1.4 update affects LDAP in Entourage
Readers are reporting problems with the recent Entourage 10.1.4 update and LDAP.
August 25, 2003
John Lockwood
It looks like Microsoft has made a major change to LDAP support in Entourage with the recent 10.1.4 update to Microsoft Office X.I can now no longer access the LDAP server I used to be able to from within Entourage but CAN from Apple Mail (on the same computer). Note: the previous versions of Entourage X also worked (with exactly the same settings).
These and other tests lead me to conclude that Entourage 10.1.4 now only supports LDAP version 3 servers and not LDAP version 2.
Unfortunately, the LDAP server I am currently using is only version 2 and Entourage does not give any option to configure which version it should use (some other LDAP utilities e.g. LDapper can do both).
As far as I can see Microsoft have NOT documented this change!!!
While I can see why version 3 support has been added to Entourage (to better support Exchange servers) it is inexcusable for them to remove version 2 support especially without telling people!
August 25, 2003
Jeff Weitzman sees another symptom of "broken" LDAP:
So far I've not had many problems with the Exchange for Entourage update (other than being disappointed that the Mail protocol is still only cumbersome IMAP), but one thing is weird: The email addresses of employees in our LDAP server come through wrong. For example, an entry for Bob Jones with email address bjones@coupons.com is often inserted into the To: field as BobJones@coupons.com. We're using Exchange 2000.
August 28, 2003
Paul Bielski reports
I have a similar situation to what John Lockwood is reporting. It appears that if Exchange support is enabled, Entourage always attempts to authenticate to the Exchange LDAP server even if it does not require authentication. I have set up a separate non-authenticated LDAP entry for our Exchange server in Entourage, and I can successfully search the global list through that Directory Services entry (in Tools->Directory Services).The really bad part is that using "Check names" when addressing a message apparently always checks the LDAP server defined by the Exchange support, yielding the error message "Directory server denied access." The "Check names" function will properly work if Exchange support is disabled, since the second non-authenticated LDAP server entry does work. Unfortunately, there is no way to disable the LDAP lookup associated with the Exchange support without disabling all of the Exchange support.
August 28, 2003
Evan Williams
I emailed you guys shortly after the release of the Exchange update for Entourage and have had some progress. Mail, Calendar, and Contacts now work okay (I had some SSL settings wrong) but checking Free/Busy meeting data still fails along with pulling email addresses from the GAL. It's the same problem as Jeff--when I type in a user that's in the GAL it will simply transplant the user's full name in front of our domain ending (i.e. - selecting Evan Williams from the GAL comes up with the email address EvanWilliams@domain.com, while it should be ewilliams@domain.com).I'm wondering if the GAL email address problem is related to the Free/Busy server not working correctly? I'm using the recommended settings for the Free/Busy server (servername-ip/public/) and that seems to fix it for most people. Maybe when trying to receive the Free/Busy data for someone it looks up the wrong username (EvanWilliams instead of ewilliams) just like when using the GAL?
10.1.5 doesn't solve the problem
September 8, 2003
John Lockwood
The recent 10.1.5 update did not restore the ability to search LDAP version 2 servers (i.e. you still cannot, whereas 10.1.3 and earlier could). Indeed after installing the Office v.X 10.1.5 update the Entouragte application remains unchanged at version 10.1.4 so this is not suprising.A solution
July 2, 2004
Igor Portnoy send us a solution to the problem with Entourage 10.1.5 connecting to LDAP in Microsoft Active Directory with and pulling user's names and e-mail addresses
In order to be able to search Global List in Active Directory running on Windows 2000 Server with MS Exchange 2000 (haven't checked Windows/Exchange 2003 yet) by clicking on "Check Names" in Entourage X (10.1.5) when composing a new e-mail message, do the following:1. Go to Tools --> Accounts --> Directory Service
2. Click on "XXX Exchange Account" and then click "Edit"
3. Go to "Directory"
4. In the "Search Base" field type dc=yourserver,dc=com (you can even specify users container by doing cn=users,dc=yourserver,dc=com)
5. Click "OK" and then "X" to close "Accounts".
6.Click "New"
7. In the "To:" field type a couple of letters of the person's name or e-mail address and click on "Check Names"
8. The list with names of people that you have recently sent e-mails to as well as list of people from your AD should appear.
September 8, 2003
Paul Reading
I installed the 10.1.5 upgrade and Word, PowerPoint and Excel all refused to start, Entourage was ok. The all froze during the splash-screen display of loading modules. I called MS Support and together we trashed the "Carbon Registration" preference in the user Library/ Preferences/Microsoft directory. That solved the problem.
September 11, 2003
A reader named Dorian describes another problem with the recent Office X 10.1.5 update:
On a PowerBook 400 Ti, after going thru all the updaters, nothing but Word will launch. I had tried trashing all of MS's prefs and the problem persisted, I just tried your suggestion, which actually I had done by trashing the entire MS folder in the prefs, and the same results. Excel actually booted originally, but stopped as well.Today I trashed the com.apple.LaunchServices.plist as well as, LSApplications, LSClamedTypes, and LSSchemes. It did not work. I will have to reinstall Office and if that doesn't work, I will have to reinstall OS X.
September 23, 2003
Burkhart
Office v.X running at 10.1.3. Installed 10.1.4 and 10.1.5 then installed each. Now Excel and Power Point Crash after the splash screen. You can see the Excel and Power Point menus briefly before it crashes. I've tried:
- Rebooting
- First Aid to repair permissions
- Unchecking the "gallery" option in Word
- Reinstalling 10.1.5
Still doesn't fix it.
Suggestions
September 26, 2003
Barry Shapiro
Another possible cause for Office apps to quit on start up is font conflicts. We had this problem while running FontReserve. The fix was to turn off Font Reserve before launching Office. I did not take the time to find the offending font. This problem is noted on Mactopia. It can also prevent the installers from running correctly.Please note that it is almost never necessary to reinstall system software and very time consuming. The core system files are well protected as applications (for the most part) do not install items in the system directory. The Console app should show something to clue in to what has gone wrong.
If you've seen these problems, please let us know.
January 2, 2004
Patrick Centurion describes another problem with using Entourage as and Exchange client:
AD & Entourage -- what a farce.We are running Active Directory with Windows 2000 servers and Exchange 2000 as well. Our Mac clients are 10.2.6 and are running Office 10.1.5.
The Password works well for the first month, when it expires and its time to change you start to get locked out. We have tried setting it up in different ways and also disabling any Keychain related passwords or activity. Still occurs on multiple machines.
We are now running Outlook 2001 with no problems, until MS pulls its hand out and gets a proper MAPI client for OS X.
January 2, 2004
Scott Daniels reports a similar problem:
I use Mail (having tried and dumped Entourage), but my password problem occurs from iSync. The password for syncing to exchange is not accepted. I've tried everything I can think of to get around it, but when the required password change occurred last time, the new one was no longer recognized.
January 6, 2004
David Glue
I am a Mac admit here who also experiences the Entourage password problem. One mistyped password, and poof! Account locked out. We're stuck using Outlook 2001 until this is resolved. Aside from missing some public folders, I can configure Entourage to work just fine within our AD domain, so this is particularly frustrating.Using OS X 10.3.2, btw.
If you've seen these password problems, please let us know.
Suggestions
January 5, 2004
Mike Lincoln
This may not be the problem Patrick Centurion experienced, but if you try to change your password when more than one machine (e.g., your PowerBook and a desktop PC) are both logged in, then you'll get locked out. The same occurs if you're logged into two PCs at the same time.
January 5, 2004
Michael Greelish proposes a solution:
Yes, I have seen this problem. I am the IT Coordinator for eight OS X 10.2.8 Macs connected to a Windows Server 2003/Active Directory network. When we did NOT let Entourage add passwords to Keychain, users started getting locked out within 2 months of our OS X upgrade (from OS 9 with Services for Macintosh on NT 4 Server.) It didn't matter if there was NO Exchange password in Keychain (we even deleted the ENTIRE Keychain), or even if we deleted and recreated the entire Exchange user account in Entourage. What DID work is LETTING Entourage memorize user passwords into Keychain and then very carefully having IT staff delete the memorized password just a few minutes before changing the Windows network password on a PC (which is only way to do this using an AD network with 10.2.8--you can't change your Windows network password from a Mac in Jaguar.) Then, once the password is changed, we have IT staff carefully reenter it into Entourage, test it, and let it be memorized by Entourage via Keychain.My theory is that somehow there is a "ghost" of the old Exchange password being retained somewhere, probably on the OS X client Macs. Entourage, if it has the wrong (or any) password memorized via Keychain, will resubmit it over and over in seconds if it's not accepted. This is probably to help in situations where the server is not responding, but WILL result in an INSTANT lockout if the password is wrong (or somehow has a "ghost" wrong password.)
I suggest others try our solution, come up with after weeks of agonizing with 3 other IT staff members during an epidemic of server lockouts. One poor guy was locked out every morning for three weeks until we came up with this solution. Fortunately, the solution has worked perfectly for the last 3+ weeks. Unfortunately we have no idea what will happen when we upgrade to 10.3 Panther by the end of February. Here's hoping Microsoft's new Entourage is out by then, or at least really soon after that, because the current 10.1.5 Entourage is a steaming pile we only use because Apple Mail's IMAP just couldn't cut it on the heavy email users' systems. BTW we can't seem to get Mail 10.3 to work with our Exchange Server 2000 either, but will upgrade to Server 2003 in February as well.
If you've tried this fix, please let us know.
March 18, 2004 -- At first, Paul Levitt though that the Mac OS X 10.3.3 updated solved a problem with Entourage. He now believes that he has stumbled upon a bug and a workaround:
Ever since installing the Entourage for Exchange update, I've been unable to synch events originated in Entourage with Exchange/Outlook. I've exchanged many emails with a Microsoft MBU SW engineer, but everyone was stumped.This is just too bizarre but, by accident, I think I found the bug.
I updated to 10.3.3 last night and, since it included many networking changes, I thought I'd try adding an event in Entourage to see if there was any improvement.
To my surprise, the new Entourage event immediately showed up in my Outlook calendar. I, of course, attributed this to 10.3.3 - but I was wrong.
Thinking the problem solved, I added another event in Entourage, only to find that it did not synch, and threw the same error I've been seeing all along. After comparing this event with the successful one, I noticed that the successful event included text in the description field at the bottom of the "New Event" window.
After some experimentation, I can now confirm that events generated in Entourage WiLL NOT synch to Exchange/Outlook unless text is entered in this field. No other changes had any effect. I have no idea whether 10.3.3 is a factor or not (it did solve some SMB issues).
Seems like a bug to me.
If you 've seen this problem, please let us know.
March 30, 2004
April Acker reports four problems with implementing Entourage X with Exchange server on a large network:
I saw your Entourage for Exchange Special Report on MacWindows.com and it struck a chord. I have been planning and implementing an OS X migration at a large corporation. The IT department wanted to integrate Active Directory and use Panther.Anyway, everything has worked seamlessly except Entourage X which has presented a huge number of issues for users.
1. A problem with authentication causes AD accounts to lock out. There is no rhyme or reason to this.
2. Users occasionally cannot send mail, and receive an SMTP error which then also causes their AD account to lock out 50 percent of the time.
3. Some users can see public folders. Others cannot. Again, no rhyme or reason to this.
4. Some users cannot see updates to reoccurring calendar events, or when the update of the calendar event is sent, only the first instance of the reoccurring appointment is sent (i.e. if the event was first scheduled in 2001, this is the appointment that the user sees as an update!)
April 6, 2004
Sandra Ketrow verified one of the problem issues:
I just read April Acker's post about Entourage X problems with a large network, particularly the lockout issue. I have been totally stymied about this, thinking it was maybe OS X problem, maybe incompatibility with the network, but have not been able to find a fix. At least I know now what this is, and that I am not alone!Suggested fixes and workarounds
April 6, 2004
John Bergh has some suggestions:
First, from April Acker:1. A problem with authentication causes AD accounts to lock out. There is no rhyme or reason to this.2. Users occasionally cannot send mail, and receive an SMTP error which then also causes their AD account to lock out 50 percent of the time.
I have noticed that if you configure your Entourage account as and "Exchange" account there is some sort of Microsoft voodoo with regards to the entering of your password. If you enter your password incorrectly it shows up as FOUR failed attempts on the Exchange server side... I don't know if that number is different in other organizations, but I'm an Exchange admin and I just saw it happen minutes ago. A similar situation exists with OS 9 and Outlook 2001. We just increased the "account lock" to 9 failed attempts and that helped our OS 9 users and their not-so-nimble fingers.
Related to this is yet more MS weirdness... You must type your password slowly or it will fail. If I recall you don't get an error (you get right in to Entourage).
Add this on top of it all: I can fail my login attempt but still receive mail... If I try to send mail I get prompted to reenter my password (because I flubbed it earlier) and then it works.
So, most of this can be alleviated by entering your password slowly. Don't ask me why!
I set up Entourage as an IMAP (not Exchange) client and I don't have either of those problems. I don't get calendaring but it's worth the decreased hassle. I also had to set up Directory Services separately to hit the "global" address book but that too is okay with me. There are other issues I'm slowly discovering so I'm recommending Entourage on X with certain reservations, to say the least.
April 12, 2004
David Morgenstern has a suggestion for the problem authentication causing Active Directory accounts to lock out:
I also have had much painful experience with this issue. Certainly, I've found that if there is any hint of an authentication problem then the account is locked out. This lockout happens even if I've only received one error message telling of a wrong password and I supposedly have a couple more tries in the bank. Nope. It's locked out on the first go.Sometimes, I've noticed that the authentication problem is worse when moving Entourage from Offline mode back to Online. So I now do the following: Click Entourage into Online mode and then Quit the program. Launch the program and enter the password.
(Morgenstern is the West Coast editor of eWEEK.com, and a contributing editor at Creativepro.)
Jeff Boyle suggests reinstalling Office X:
We have been having intermittent problems and some major pains with Exchange and Entourage. I highly recommend the tips on the Entourage MVP site [part of the Microsoft MVPs program]. They suggested clean install of Office X (use remove Office if you have to which is on the value pack):
Runs like a dream on three machines so far. Its a pain, but it works!
March 30, 2004
Ben Robertson has problems with calendars:
I actually decided to test this on my install of Entourage because I was having some trouble (more like oddities) w/ Outlook 2001, on Exchange 2000 with new G5 dual 2's (10.3.3)I actually could see any calendar event that I create, and it shows up in my calendar, but there's no "accept", and the older calendar events that are already seen in Outlook, and which recur monthly, aren't seen in Entourage. Also, there's no way to specify which calendar event belongs to which email address (if you've got multiple accounts)
Also, the Address book doesn't seem to work. I don't get any of the global address' listed (but, they are seen because you can start to type a users' name, and it gets filled in)
If you've seen these problems, please let us know.
Suggestions:
April 6, 2004
John Bergh has a suggestion for the address book problem:
If you go to Tools->Directory Services do you see them? Again, I've stopped using the "Exchange" account setup but I recall that my "global" addresses did not show up in my "Entourage" address book, only under Directory Services.
April 12, 2004
Eric Morgan
I recently upgraded servers from Windows 2000/Exchange 5.5 to Windows 2003/Exchange 2003. I spent a good part of the morning trying to get all features on Entourage (Mac OS X 10.3.3) working--global contact list, Calendar, scheduling, and email). I quickly discovered that you need LDAP&Free/Busy server configured to make this happen.I wanted to make sure everyone knew about the "search base" option on the Directory tab. I put in the active directory tags (cn=users,dc=domain name,dc=com) in the search base field.
Users = user container name.domain name = domain name - com = com.
In the Free/Busy server field I put the servername/public/.
I can now search my global contact list and schedule appoints with co-workers, calendar, and email.
Entourage/Exchange calendar gets erased; Getting Free/Busy to work
May 13, 2004
Robert Berger reports two problems with Entourage accessing Exchange Server. The first sounds serious:
1.) I've now had a repeating problem where my calendar items get completely wiped out periodically (and unpredictably). Usually, the items are still available in the Exchange Web interface, but sometimes, it will resync and put the items from Exchange back into Entourage. Most times, it just ends up wiping out the calendar in both places.I have no idea how to track this down. Are there log files to look at? Is there any way to recover my calendar info (it wipes out EVERYTHING, my entire history).
2.) I also have not been able to get Free/Busy to work. The Entourage interface lets my check the free/busy status, gives me a login prompt to log into the Exchange web interface server. I don't know how it got the address of the web interface server as I entered the Exchange Server real address (HQ-EX-1.mydomain.com/public/) in the free/busy server field in the Advanced tab of the Accounts preferences.
After I click OK on the login I get:
Error: Scheduling data could not be foundExplanation: Scheduling data could not be found. Check your Entourage account settings and try again. If you continue to receive this message, contact your Exchange account administrator for assistance.
Error: 1401
I am running Windows 2003/Exchange 2003 on some HP server (its not under my control), Mac OS X 10.3.3, Microsoft Office v. X 10.1.5 on a PowerBook G4.
If you've seen either problem,
May 18, 2004
Pete Crosby reports seeing the first problem:
I have had the same problem and I have lost all of my calendar events several times. All I can recommend is that you back up your Microsoft Users Data folder frequently. At preset I am only syncing items from a specific category rather all.I have had users that sync all categories and have not had problems.
May 18, 2004
Darren Heinrichsen has also seen the loss of calendar events as well:
I have had this happen to us as well... Out of about 15 Macs that we have using Entourage with Exchange, 3 different users have had their calendars totally wiped out (one person in particular it has happened multiple times). Luckily we backup exchange mailboxes and were able to restore the calendar, but it's very annoying.I am sure that we do not have virus scanning (or any other type of scanning) turned on for the M: drive. The calendar wipeout only happens with Entourage users, not with any of our PC users.
May 18, 2004
Karen Elsbree offers a suggestion for the Entourage Free/Busy problem:
We have also seen this problem with the Entourage Free/Busy. We have replicated the Free/Busy folder from our 5.5 sites to our 2003 site and used the FQDN/public/ in the free/busy server field and the error went away.However, we still have "no data" for the calendars when we create a meeting and click on the scheduling tab.
May 24, 2004
Daniel Hudkins
We are using Exchange 2003. I am using OS X 10.3.3 and Entourage Version 10.1.4.Today I experienced exactly the behavior described in the May 13, 2004 posting of Robert Berger. It deleted my entire calendar folder from the Exchange server. I had to restore from a backup.
I have taken Entourage (which I was testing for next academic year) offline and will not begin again until patch is available or we get 2004.
May 24, 2004
Lorin Rivers
My calendar and contacts also were deleted. Entourage got blamed for bringing down the Exchange server...
June 11, 2004
Jim Roletter
We had the same problem here with a user in our school district. He was using Entourage all his calendar items on the Exchange server were deleted. The connection to the Exchange Server was being made via IMAP over a network while at a conference.
July 15, 2004
Alexis Chen
I am having the very same problem. Folders of email and Calendar randomly disappears. Resync with the server, then the user works in and out of the office (connecting to the server in the exact same manner - I have the webmail alias for external use, mapped internally to our server through our DNS hosts file). Users have been up for approximately 1 month, then more consistently, 1 day before the next disappearance.Specs: Windows 2000 SP3, Exchange 2000 SP3, Office 2004 (Entourage 2004), Panther
Suggestions for getting Free/Busy to work
May 26, 2004
Jeremy Reichmans
One of the people asking about Exchange was trying to get free/busy to work in Entourage 10.1.4/11. It will not necessarily work in the same server that you access your account from.Entourage 10.1.4 and 11 both need access to the Public Folders server in order to see free/busy data. In my environment, we finally got this working for Entourage 10.1.4 and later by replicating the free/busy Public Folders from a back end server to all of our front end servers.
This is accomplished through an Exchange replication process, and I presume it's automatic. It means that we can type in the address for our front end server followed by "/public/" in the Advanced tab of the Exchange account setup, and free/busy will work.
This advice is now on the Entourage MVPs site.
We also require DAV over SSL, so the DAV connection to the free/busy Public Folders is also encrypted.
Also, since it's vaguely related: we could not get event invitations to be recognized as such in Outlook/Windows and OWA clients. They would show up as .ics attachments, not invitations (with the accept/decline interface). It turns out that, because we were asking Entourage 10.1.4 users to send out messages through our non-Exchange SMTP server (PMDF Mail), their invitations were not getting the required MAPI wrapper. I would suggest anyone who is having problems set up SMTP services on an Exchange server -- however, normal precautions apply, so you'll probably want to require authentication (Entourage 10.1.4 can use SPA, which I think is NTLMv1) and SSL.
March 29, 2005
Anthony DiPiano
I have a client using Entourage 2004 with Exchange and twice in the last 4 months, he's lost calendar entries. The first time it happened, I noticed that some entries were in the calendar. I think some of them were from when he was using Entourage X. Really strange. I haven't been to his site to evaluate the latest loss of entries, but expect that it will be similar to the last time.
June 11, 2004
Todd Schneider has a suggestion that is a bit unexpected:
Does your Exchange Server have a drive letter "M"?We had a similar problem with hot syncs to user's folders where the calendar would get wiped out. (Actually, all the calendar events would loose their start times and end up on the current day).
Turns out that every time a server virus scan ran it would scan drive 'M' and corrupt the calendars, after the next sync was done only users who synced their palm pilots were affected.
You may want to check your virus scan schedule to see if there a connection.
June 22, 2004
Darren Heinrichsen replied to this suggestion:
I am sure that we do not have virus scanning (or any other type of scanning) turned on for the M: drive. The calendar wipeout only happens with Entourage users, not with any of our PC users.
If you've seen this suggestion work,
Entourage/Exchange email deletion problems, disappearing email
September 24, 2004
Jon Gardner
There have been reports of disappearing email when using Entourage X or 2004 with Exchange Server 2003. This sounds similar to the disappearing calendar problem reported at MacWindows.We have experienced this problem as well. I've tossed it at our Microsoft Premier Support team to see if they can give me any constructive assistance; in the meantime, my recommendation is to stay away from Entourage altogether and use Mail.app in conjunction with Snerdware's excellent integration tools for Exchange Server calendars and address books. Using ADmitMac helps too, but is not strictly necessary.
We've previously covered announcements of Snerdware's Address X and Groupcal. If you've had experience with using Snerdware's tools with Exchange Server, or have seen email disappearing
Microsoft has released Entourage 2004 as part of the new Office 2004. According to the Microsoft web site, it still requires WebDAV and LDAP to be enabled on Exchange Server 2000 (with Service Pack 2) or later. Our first reader reports on the new version were mixed.(If you'd like to comment on Entourage 2004, )
Readers find problems with Entourage 2004
A pair of reader found new problems that they say did not occur with previous versions of Entourage X.
May 24, 2004
Daniel Katz reported a problem with Entourage 2004 and Exchange receipts:
I have all my Exchange return receipts filed into a "receipts" folder, which has worked fine in Entourage v.X without a problem. However, I noticed an odd thing when upgrading to Entourage 2004: most of the contents of the "receipt" folder would not sync with Exchange! Strange is that some of the files did sync and always the same ones, even after recreating the Entourage profile or emptying the cache. These files are visible in Outlook 2003 and Entourage v.X -- why not Entourage 2004?I've narrowed down the problem to this: Entourage will NOT see Outlook "Read" or "Not Read" receipts. It will, however, see Delivery ("Delivered") receipts. You can easily replicate this by sending yourself an e-mail using Outlook 2003, asking for both a Read and Delivery receipt. You will receive both receipts in Outlook 2003, but in Entourage 2004 you will only receive the Delivery receipt. I have duplicated this on more than one Entourage installation and Exchange account. We run Exchange 2003.
As far as I can tell, this is a MAJOR flaw in Exchange support for Entourage 2004 that did not exist in Entourage v.X's IMAP support.
May 24, 2004
Jeremy Matthews found several problems:
I imported settings from Entourage X, and I noticed a few problems that don't appear under Entourage v. X:1) Using the "check names" LDAP lookup feature in new email returns a -17799 error: The directory service was unable to perform the search. Settings are identical in both versions of Entourage.
2) "Subscribing" to public folders does not include their children. If you want a subfolder, you have to select them one by one (what a pain). Also, Entourage says that there are no messages for some public folders, of which I find more than 200 in Entourage v. X and Apple's Mail!
Both versions are setup identically...
May 26, 2004
Richard Jenkins replies to Monday's report by Jeremy Matthews (directly above). He's seen both of the issues Matthews reported, but believe one of them is a feature, not a bug:
> Jeremy Matthews:1) Using the "check names" LDAP lookup feature in new email returns a -17799 error...
That is our experience as well. We have Exchange 5.5 in production and Exchange 2003 in late testing, and various LDAP services on other platforms. We can't get LDAP info, using either identical settings or a variety of new configs. We'll keep trying though.
> Jeremy Matthews:2) "Subscribing" to public folders does not include their children. If you want a subfolder, you have to select them one by one (what a pain). Also, Entourage says that there are no messages for some public folders, of which I find more than 200 in Entourage v. X and Apple's Mail!
No, this is a feature! We have thousands of the damn things on our server, and most other IMAP clients just grab the whole list. This is a huge time waster, as an initial connection has to download them all and their content headers, and then while you're subsequently connected it keeps sneaking looks to see if anything changed, and synchronizing them... I for one am glad to see some management of Public Folders in a Mac client.
Can't please everyone!
May 28, 2004
Adrian Cooke found that binding to Active Directory had a negative result on Entourage 2004:
I first tested Entourage 2004 Test Drive on a Mac with wasn't bound to AD with the ADPlugin. It found the Exchange 2000 server, directory server and free/busy server. Mail, calendar and contacts all synchronized okay, although they took a long while to do so, about 15 minutes for my mailbox which is 50 MB.I then tested it again on another Mac which was bound to AD with the ADPlugin. This time it wouldn't find the directory server or free/busy server.
May 28, 2004
David Hulse found problems with signatures and OLE tables and images:
I've been using the Test Drive of Entourage in conjunction with Exchange 2000 servers. I'm pleasantly surprised about most of the features, but one thing I noticed was that email signatures appear to be either on for all mails or off. There is no equivalent of the Outlook for Windows option to discard the signature when replying.An email with OLEd graphics such as a JPEG or a table directly sent from Word or Excel also will not render correctly in Entourage. If Microsoft could fix this one, the Entourage client would finally be able to replace the PC on my desk, which is currently there for Outlook only.
Readers with easy upgrade experiences
May 24, 2004
Rick Hazey reports success in getting Exchange 2004 up and running:
The Windows IT department of a client of mine received and installed Entourage 2004 on his MacOS X computer, but was unable to configure it properly for use with their Exchange Server. Having installed Entourage X with mixed success in the past, I wasn't too optimistic. However, much to my surprise, setup was fast, easy, and automatic. The setup consisted of allowing Entourage to locate and retrieve the configuration information. All I had to do was verify the information as correct.I decided to try the test drive version with another client, where I had been unable to make Entourage X work at all. The process was also fast and automatic...This is a vast improvement over previous versions and I can finally rid my corporate clients of Outlook 2001.
May 24, 2004
Timothy Frantz also had good luck, using Entourage 2004 for Mac Test Drive:
Well, after a year or more of trying, I can now use one program for my email needs. Out of the box, Entourage 2004 imported my old Entourage X settings and I can now send email OUTSIDE of my company's Exchange network.Before, I could send/receive email normally from coworkers, and I could receive email from outside the network, but I had to use the web-based client to send outside the network. What a pain it has been to have two programs open all the time. But this seems to be working fine.
May 28, 2004
Shane Palmer had a positive experience with Entourage 2004 and calendars and contacts:
My initial testing of connecting Entourage 2004 (I am currently using the Test Drive version) to Exchange is much more positive than that of Entourage X. For one thing I was not able to get Entourage X to work with my Exchange calendar and contacts, and although it works now in Entourage 2004 it could have also been fixed by the upgrade of our Outlook Web Access server to Exchange 2003. I have not done much testing beyond this though.
May 26, 2004
John Wilson found a problem with Entourage's installation:
I installed Office 2004 yesterday afternoon on my Mac, told the install wizard to import my previous identity (from Entourage) and then delete all previous versions of Office (which on my Mac went back to Office 98 in some esoteric settings in the Classic side). It seems to have done all that correctly. When I opened Entourage, it remembered all my settings, displayed my calendar, contacts and e-mail correctly. So far so good.THEN I noticed that e-mail was disappearing from my Exchange Inbox and discovered that it was being moved to the LOCAL Inbox. As I kept watching, mail continued to be moved from my Exchange mailboxes to my local Inbox. Since I work in an IT dept., I thought I should let it go to see what happened for testing purposes. By this morning there were over 3700 e-mails in my local Inbox. I have a very extensive storage hierarchy on our Exchange server (several hundred folders?) and some e-mail from most of those folders has already been moved to the local Inbox. Most of those e-mails have an icon indicating that they are "on the server" (about 95 percent), but others indicate that they are stored locally. Looking at my Exchange account from Apple Mail, I see that the e-mail stored on my office Mac's local Inbox is not showing up in the folders they are supposed to be in, so to some degree or another they seem to have been truly moved (more than the 5% that don't have the "on the server" icon).
Additional info - I have no rules set up in Entourage at all. Junk mail is on, at the lowest setting, but that should move junk e-mail to the server Junk Mail folder, not the local Inbox. This may have been occurring in Entourage X as well. I hardly ever used it because I had been seeing some strange e-mail moving around, like the symptom described above.
Guesses at this point: Entourage may be trying to make a local copy in case it gets disconnected from the server -- an Off-line copy -- but since the folders don't exist locally, everything gets copied into the Inbox. Counter argument: all mail from the Sent Items were moved to the local Inbox, not the local Sent box, which does exist. (My server Sent box is now empty!) (Not sure if both Sent folders have the same name, however. Have to check.)
I quit Entourage so this anomalous process has stopped, but I now have to reclassify 3700 e-mails!
If any of you have ideas why this is occurring, please let me know. At this point I would say I can't recommend Entourage at all.
June 25, 2004
Jim Howard
I had a similar experience trying to test Entourage 2004 as reported earlier by John Wilson. Based on his experience, I did a clean install of Office 2004, manually configured (as much as possible in the Exchange environment) the setup, turned of everything that was automatic (or at least I thought ). Including junk, synchronization, etc. When I started it promptly still cycled through my entire exchange folder structure (about 4300 messages, in about 20 different folder/trees) and moved them all. If it had moved them to the local inbox I would have been okay with that. But it moved all messages from every server folder to the Deleted items folder! I manually copied them back to a new folder to hold them for resorting , but it moved those all to the deleted items folder also! So I quit Entourage 2004, went to my PC, and used Outlook to move the messages back to the inbox/other folders.Needless to say this is not adequate behavior from a supposedly enterprise level product.
May 26, 2004
Jardar Abrahamsen has a Word 2004 review that reports problems with compatibility with Word for Windows when certain international characters are used. He sent us a summary of his report:
Entourage 2004 17799 LDAP error
May 24, 2004
Jeremy Matthews
I imported settings from Entourage X, and I noticed a few problems that don't appear under Entourage v. X:
Using the "check names" LDAP lookup feature in new email returns a -17799 error: The directory service was unable to perform the search. Settings are identical in both versions of Entourage.
May 26, 2004
Richard Jenkins
That is our experience as well. We have Exchange 5.5 in production and Exchange 2003 in late testing, and various LDAP services on other platforms. We can't get LDAP info, using either identical settings or a variety of new configs. We'll keep trying though.
April 3, 2006
Julie Soucek
I was able to fix this problem in Entourage 2004 by removing the search base string (dc=company,dc=domain,dc=com) in the LDAP tab. This makes no sense incidentally, as earlier versions required this.
Also, adding my Exchange server in the "exclusions" list for our proxy eliminated the login errors that some users reported. (I've noticed that exclusions don't always work right away so be patient. Also, make sure to restart Entourage after each change that you make.)
TIP: Importing Address Book contacts into Entourage 2004
That is our experience as well. We have Exchange 5.5 in production and Exchange 2003 in late testing, and various LDAP services on other platforms. We can't get LDAP info, using either identical settings or a variety of new configs. We'll keep trying though.
May 26, 2004
A reader reports:
The new Entourage looks nice-and-neat, except for one BIG glitch: There is no way to import contacts from Apple's Address Book to Entourage's. This problem existed in Office X, but I thought they'd have thought of repairing it...There's no way I'm going to manually rewrite all my contacts in Entourage, and just because of that glitch I'm not going to use Entourage...
Solutions
May 28, 2004 -- Several readers wrote in response to reader complaint that Entourage 2004 cannot import Address Book contacts.
Eleni Nine sent us the names of a couple of utilities that fill some holes in the recently released Entourage 2004:
To the person who stated that Entourage 2004 does not provide a method to import Address Book contacts, I have a free solution (and good one at that). It's Address Book Exporter, a freeware solution that exports all your Address Book contacts to a tab-delimited text file. Even better, it provides settings specifically for matching Entourage (although it is for Entourage x.V, it still works very well w/Entourage 2004).(Be sure to give a small donation for your appreciation.)As for synching the two programs, the best solution (although very complex in settings) is Sync Entourage-Address Book 2 which is designated for Entourage 2004 and Panther Mail. It's shareware that runs $20 but if you need to keep both apps synchronized then this is your best solution.
Rand Lien is using iSync:
It took a while and and new phone, but I've been successful at using iSync with Entourage 2004. It also synced all of my contacts from Apple's Address book (hundreds). First I installed Entourage and imported all my Mail settings and messages (thousands). It worked great, even kept all my folders intact. Then I purchased a new Treo 600 and set it up with iSync. Then I used PalmOne's HotSync Manager to sync my phone with Apple's Address Book and iCal. The combination of the Treo 600 Address Book and iCal sync with iSync, and the HotSync Manager sync with Entourage keeps all my tools (toys) in sync, including my Mac at home though .Mac with iSync.MS can make life difficult, but I must admit that I love the new Project feature in Entourage 2004!
June 2, 2004
Dr. Ioh
You can also export all your contacts from Address Book as a single vCard, then drag this to Entourage's Address Book. Works well, with minimal cleanup.
Entourage 2004 not querying LDAP or AD.
There is one tip offered below.
(Also note that readers have reported LDAP problems with Entourage 10.1.4 and 10.1.5 and an Entourage 2004 17799 LDAP error.)
June 2, 2004
Martin Hill asks for help with this problem:
Entourage 2004 is unsuccessful in querying our LDAP server or our Active Directory Server to pull out addresses of users in our organization we wish to email to.Apple's Address Book does successfully connect and query our LDAP server as does Apple Mail, but Entourage 2004 refuses to.
Test we have done so far indicate that Entourage is sending malformed LDAP queries that have the LDAP server sending back error messages. We've found that calling up Entourage's Directory Services and typing in the email address of someone in our organization WILL correctly pull up their entry in the LDAP server, but typing in their name doesn't work!
We'd be keen to know if anyone else is having problems with this as well or whether it is an issue with our particular configuration?
June 28, 2004
Gary Estler is another reader with this problem. He also reports other annoyances:
I'm running a Ti G4 PowerBook with Mac OS 10.3.4 and recently upgraded to Microsoft Office 2004. I was hoping it would allow me to finally cease reliance on Classic and Microsoft Outlook 2001 for my Company's Exchange Server based email. I got everything to work EXCEPT access the Global Access List.I've used all the possible ways of inserting the server's address in the Directory Access option to no avail. The typical response I get is LDAP Server Error (-17768).
As frustrating as it is, this may be for the best as I find some of the limitations of Entourage to be quite annoying. For instance:
- No ability to "Save As" from the Inbox message list view.
- Messages must be saved as either text or Entourage Mail. (No option to save as .rtf or .htm).
- No ability to customize the toolbar.
- No "Save Attachments" option in the toolbar.
June 28, 2004
Casey McCullough
We are not even able to get Entourage to query Active Directory by email address. We keep getting an Error -3260 when we type in a name or email address in Directory Service. The Error -3260 description is as follows: "The connection to the server failed because the network is unavailable."I'm able to send/receive email, so that's not the problem. I searched this error and came up with nothing.
I think I've got all the right information plugged in on the setup of the Directory Service, but any help/advice you could give would be greatly appreciated.
June 25, 2004
April Acker
Several users in the group I support were recently upgraded to Entourage 2004, which works great with Exchange and seems to have solved the email-related lockout issues. However, one reoccurring issue we ran into was that Directory Services no longer worked for looking up contact information. Changing the LDAP server to an IP address didn't work either - in fact nothing seemed to work. At the root of the problem was the fact that I had imported the user's previous Entourage X identity. Something involved with importing the identity caused Directory Services to no longer work.However, deleting the profile and re-creating it allows Directory Services with no problem. All the user's mail will have to be downloaded again, but it is a sure way to fix the problem. I still recommend importing the identity if elements such as signatures, rules, or archived local mail existed in Entourage X. After the import, just delete the actual Exchange profile and re-create it again, with all of the other elements in place already.
July 15, 2004
Jay Christianson found that the above fix worked
I read the fix for directory services that related to identities. I went into the File menu for Identities and switched identites, made a new identity, and yep the LDAP lookups work now.
July 15, 2004
Ernest Lehmann's and has another fix:
Like most other people who upgraded to Entourage 2004 with an Exchange 2000 email server, I found myself trying to figure out why I kept getting errors in LDAP queries after I'd upgraded.I had to edit the directory services account (under the DIRECTORY tab).
And adjust the search base to read: dc=mydomain,dc=com
And I also had to check "This server requires me to log on"
I needed to ensure the following was unchecked: Override default LDAP port 389
July 15, 2004
Martin Hill has it working now, but isn't exactly sure why:
I previously reported problems getting Entourage 2004 successfully querying LDAP to auto-fill email addresses or even look up names in Directory Services.This is now working for us and I suspect it is something to do with the LDAP server we have been using. Previously we were using the LDAP server running on our old Exchange 5.5 server as the new Exchange 2003 server refused to talk LDAP to our clients at that time.
However, after reports that some of my colleagues recently had success connecting to the new AD server, we tried again and it now works fine - autocompleting email addresses after clicking the "check names" button in email messages as well as searching on names in Directory Services.
We didn't have to delete identities and re-create profiles or anything. We also didn't have to enter anything into the search base field - we had previously experimented with this field (dc=yourserver,dc=com etc) without success and in the end it works for us with this field blank.
We did need to tick "This server requires me to log on" and "Override default LDAP port" and fill in the custom port number our Exchange sysadmins specified. (We had set these same options this previously with no success.)
July 27, 2004
Alan Klein passed a fix he found for a problem with Entourage 2004 and LDAP directory access that resulted in an error code 17799:
I'm the Mac consultant at a major corporation in New York City and once we upgraded to Office 2004 we could no longer get access to the Exchange Server's Global Address Book &emdash; which caused a major problem for our Mac users.I stumbled across the Entourage 2004 public forum at Microsoft and came upon a fix that worked. Here it is:
Re: LDAP error code 17799
Date: 29 Jun 2004 21:48:10 -0700
From: Steve Gualandri
News Groups: microsoft.public.mac.office.entourageI recently upgraded to Office 2004. I was using Office X. I had no problems with Directory Services and other LDAP stuff in Office X.
Since upgrading to Office 2004, I am unable to perform an address lookup in Entourage 2004 V11.0.0 (040405). I continue to get "Directory Service was unable to perform the request Error 17799". I verified my settings and they are the same settings that I used in Office X. Can anyone tell me what error code 17799 is? I am running OS 10.3.4.
Steve
I actually talked to support about this one. In my case, it ended up being simple. Edit the Exchange Account Settings. Under the "Directory" tab, open up "Advanced Options". Make sure "This server requires me to log on".
By the way, I did not have that error code. My only symptom was failed searches in Entourage's Directory Services.
I checked "This server requires me to log on" and everything now works!
TIP for Entourage and Exchange Server 2003 disappearing folders.
July 15, 2004
David Pughe (of London) passed along a tip he found about folder names in Entourage:
Yesterday I found out that if a folder under your Exchange Server inbox has a forward slash (e.g. "books / CDs") then it will not show up in Entourage v.10.1.5. Remove the / and it shows up in Entourage.
Entourage 2004 support of global address lists without WebDAV
Michael Lincoln sent us two reports in July and September of 2004 on how to get an Exchange Server global address list (GAL) or distribution list into Entourage 2004, even if your system administrator won't turn on WebDAV in Exchange Server 2000 and later.
In Part 2 of Lincoln's report below, he describes how the solution he proposed in Part 1 in limited by the sparse display of global address list (GAL) data inside the Entourage GUI. He describes a workaround to that enables the full GAL to be displayed in Entourage. He also describes syncing to iCal using an AppleScript
Part 1
July 19, 2004
Michael Lincoln
At my organization has turned off WebDAV service in our Exchange 2000 servers. Our security office considers WebDAV to be a security risk. Before now I had continued to use Outlook 2001 (under Classic) because I needed the global address list (GAL).I've now adopted Entourage 2004 and have my GAL despite lacking WebDAV. Apparently Entourage directory services do not depend on WebDAV, only the mail itself. I have therefore created two active Entourage accounts: an IMAP account ("VHA Mail") for mail, calendar events, etc, and an Exchange-type account ("VHA Directory") for directory services. The IMAP account is set to be the default for mail, but under the Directory tab the Exchange account is set as the default for directory services. Now I can "check names" against the GAL when (via "VHA Directory") when writing messages using "VHA Mail"! This provides 99 percent of the needed Exchange functionality: mail, calendaring, and directory services all work. Only public folders don't work: although the "VHA Directory" account shows the public folders icon, I can't see the mail inside because I lack WebDAV.
By trial and error I encountered a few settings tweaks that I seemed to require: I used the IP address of both the Exchange server and the LDAP server because name resolution didn't seem to work for the Exchange account (something to do with WebDAV?). In the Directory tab I also had to check two advanced options: "This server requires me to log in" and "Override default LDAP port (3268)". Finally, I used the schema "IP-number/public" for the free-busy server under the Advanced account setup tab. However, as mentioned above, I can't actually see the public mail, only the folders.
If you've tried this
Lincoln also sent along some advise on setting up Entourage:
One additional tip: our servers are centrally managed and I couldn't figure out who to ask for IP address or name of the WebDAV server. To get around this, I let Entourage do the automatic account setup, which filled in the name automatically. Then I did a reverse DNS lookup on that name to get the IP address number that I used as outlined above. In general, however, the automatic setup needs tweaking and I suggest a manual setup after you garner the required server information.Your mileage may vary, but even lacking WebDAV I now have virtually everything I need.
Part 2 of Entourage 2004 support of GAL without WebDAV on Exchange Server
September 7, 2004
Michael Lincoln
I have previously reported on setting up up both an Exchange-type account and an IMAP account in Entourage 2004 in order to get the "Check Names" functionality in Entourage. Surprisingly, while the mail folders won't work in Exchange and the LDAP isn't supported in IMAP, a "dual account" (IMAP and