Entourage’s new features may not be enough to persuade you to dump iCal, Mail, and Address Book.

 

For all your email, contact management, and calendar tasks, there’s Entourage. Unlike the rest of Office 2008’s apps, Entourage got a minimal makeover for this new version. Whereas the other programs got spiffy new interfaces, most of Entourage’s new features are tucked behind the scenes.

 

Junk Filter

Entourage does a better job of screening out spam.

 

In the last few years, email spam has gone from being a nuisance to a real security threat, thanks to phishing messages that try to
get you to give up your personal account information. Entourage 2008 now includes improved junk mail protection that warns you when it detects a phishing message that links to a potentially dangerous website.

 

Exchange Support

Entourage has always supported Microsoft Exchange email servers, but the new 2008 edition takes Exchange to the next level. Users on an Exchange server (which would be almost exclusively business users in a large IT environment) can now view each other’s schedules to set up meetings. It also lets you take advantage of Exchange’s mail account management features, so you can quickly set up an out-of-office message that will automatically start on the day you leave town and stop on the day you return.

Cooler Calendar

Entourage’s colorful new calendar feature adds functionality that iCal already has.

 

Subtle tweaks in Entourage’s calendar make it easier to enter new events and keep track of all the different roles you play in life. A long overdue color-coding feature lets you give each category its own color—just as you’ve been able to do in iCal for years. You can also now create and modify events just by dragging and dropping them
into your calendar.

 

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New To Do List

Keep track of your daily tasks with Entourage’s To Do list.

 

We never understood why Entourage lacked a dedicated To Do list, but Microsoft has at last added one to Entourage 2008. This list gives you a simple, at-a-glance view of what you’ve accomplished and what’s still left to tackle, complete with information about how long it’s been on your list and how far past due it might be. Like calendar entries, To Do items can be added to color-coded categories, which let you quickly spot whether a given task is for work, for home, or for one of the many other roles you play in life.

 

My Day

My Day seems like it would fit perfectly in Mac OS X’s Dashboard, but it’s a completely separate app, not available as a widget.

 

The most significant and obvious change to Entourage 2008 is the new My Day applet, which launches at system startup by default, communicates with Entourage—even when Entourage is closed—to give you an encapsulated view of your upcoming appointments and To Do items. My Day supports all of the color-coded categories that you create in Entourage, which makes it intuitive enough to take a quick glance and then get back to what you were doing.

 

We weren’t sure what to think of this little nag the first time it launched, but over time it’s grown on us. For those with busy schedules and enough screen real estate to keep My Day in view, this may be one of the best new features in the suite, and it’s the most compelling reason that some users may want to run Entourage rather than use Mail, iCal, and Address Book.

 

Our Verdict

Entourage 2008 definitely includes some important new features, and we’re glad to see Microsoft giving this app a badly needed update. Yet what’s most striking about the new Entourage isn’t what’s been built in, but what’s been left out. In light of some of the features Microsoft has added to its Windows mail and contacts app, Outlook, we’re baffled to see so some fairly obvious features simply absent from this new version of Entourage.

 

One of the most notable and obvious omissions here is support for iCal’s ICS calendar format. While Windows users can now subscribe to iCal calendars as a means of sharing schedules with colleagues, friends, and family, Mac users will have to steer clear of Entourage if they want the same luxury. It’s a strange thing to leave out on the platform that invented the ICS format, and it’s the main reason we still prefer iCal to Entourage for our calendar needs. Also missing is support for RSS feeds, which is one of the most compelling new features in Outlook 2007 (for Windows), making it easy to track news feeds along with the rest of your communications.

 

We’re glad to see the calendar interface get some decent usability updates, but most of those seem to be of the “oh, duh, why didn’t they do that before” variety.

 

Overall, Entourage 2008 feels like an afterthought in the otherwise intelligently revamped Office suite, and—apart from improvements to Exchange support, which will benefit relatively few users—it’s hard to find a significant reason to switch from Mail/iCal/Address Book.