Microsoft’s released a white paper on how to make Entourage work with Exchange. That’s good. Unfortunately, some of the guidance in the troubleshooting section is frustratingly generic. For example, check this note: “In an Active Directory or network infrastructure that is heavily secured, Entourage 2004 Exchange clients can experience difficulty in locating the Active Directory global access server and authenticating the user account. Environments where the servers are locked down and the required ports are closed will experience these problems, and Entourage auto-configure might not work.” So, it might not work, but you’re not going to tell me why it might not work, nor what to do about it.
On the other hand, there are lots of good tips:
- Always send to fully qualified addresses (e.g. use “user@FQDN” and not just “user”). This bites me sometimes when I send messages to distribution groups; if I don’t remember to add the FQDN, when the message arrives recipients’ Outlook rules won’t catch the message properly.
- If you change the IP address of your Mac, you have to quit and relaunch Entourage or it will refuse to connect to your Exchange server
- Using the “Send / Receive Now” command doesn’t do anything; Exchange synchronization is automatic and basically unaffected by anything you do (other than quitting and relaunching, or switching Entourage identities)
- If you add a second Exchange account, by default it does not sync contacts and calendar data with the server. If you enable syncing on multiple Exchange accounts, they all sync according to the settings you define. I love this feature, since it keeps my calendar unified between three different accounts, but it was nice of them to have it default to “off” to avoid rude surprises.
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