In a quick comparison, the synchronization works as it does for Apple Mail as long as you exclude the Outlook 2011 database.īringing in data from Entourage was a snap. For anyone in a business or educational setting, where you’re using Portable Home Directory (PHD) sync, I noticed no problems with PHD sync at all. In this release of Outlook, the restore is all or nothing, but a lot better than the state of Time Machine with Entourage. The Outlook development team acknowledged that doing a partial restore, such as a single message or a single contact, would be quite tedious. For example, to get to my signatures, the folder path is /Volumes/jwelch/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities/Main Identity/Data Records/Signatures/0T/0B/0M/0K/-not the things easy selective restores are made of. And due to the requirements of Spotlight and others, the deeper folder structure is incomprehensible. Because everything is in individual files, once you’ve done your initial backup, then any changes only require backing up those changes, (just make sure you exclude the Outlook 2011 database from Time Machine.) However, there’s no actual Time Machine integration, a la Apple Not a bad reduction, and you can ignore it completely for backups. The database is not only non-critical, it’s much smaller in my case, my Entourage Database is under 5.5GB, and my Outlook 2011 database is over 500MB. The program popped a message saying that since I had restored from Time Machine, (amusingly, this message is hardcoded into Outlook 2011 based on the assumption that the only time you’re going to have all the individual files and no database is after a Time Machine restore), it was going to rebuild the database, which it did. So what would happen if I deleted the database? After quitting Outlook 2011 and the Database Daemon process, I deleted the database file and restarted Outlook 2011. I also have an Exchange Calendar with gobs of public folders (I live by my to-do lists), and I have three separate Directory Service accounts that I use as part of my work.Īccording to the Outlook development team, the database is there purely to optimize search and other non-essential routines. I have over 70 IMAP rules, a handful of SMTP and Exchange rules, and too many Mailing List Manager rules to count. Back-end servers run the gamut from MobileMe, Kerio, and Communigate Pro to Exchange 2007. I tested Outlook 2011 in the same configuration that I use Entourage on a daily basis: six IMAP accounts total, with three accounts using SSL for both send and receive, two Gmail accounts, and one Exchange 2007 Exchange Web Services (EWS) account. I’ve seen the same behavior in other Cocoa applications-Cocoa just doesn’t do drag and drop as well as Carbon. You don’t have to do the click-and-hold delay when dragging text, and dragging an attachment into a background Entourage mail window is a far simpler experience than doing so with Outlook 2011, where I had to bring the message window to the foreground and then drag the file from a Finder window in the background to the message window. As a result, Outlook 2011 takes a step back when it comes to drag and drop. Some of the user interface (UI) lags in Entourage while checking mail or doing other tasks never appeared or were far less annoying than in Entourage.Ĭocoa magic aside, drag and drop in Carbon applications always works more intuitively.

Outlook 2011 launches minutes faster for me on the first launch of the day after a shutdown. Though I did no benchmark testing, Outlook 2011 feels faster than Entourage. Unlike the rest of the Office 2011 suite, Outlook 2011 supports Mac OS Services (so did Entourage), and you get some of the basic niceties that Cocoa has. Moving forward, the Outlook development team will have an easier time than the other Office development teams with operating system compatibility. Outlook 2011 is a Cocoa application it doesn’t have a legacy of over 20-plus years on the Mac and doesn’t have the kind of code base that the other Office programs have.

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