Microsoft Entourage Calendar Preferences

If you’re looking for a way to automatically tentatively add calendar invitations when received in Microsoft Entourage, there’s a calendar preference option defined to perform just this behavior…

If you’re a popular individual, you may find coworkers fighting for a free timeslot on your calendar. Naturally, you want to provide folks with the most up-to-date view of your calendar while their examining your availability for a meeting as well as give yourself a quick view of which hours of your calendar have been requested to attend a meeting.

To this end, the “Tentatively add events when invitations are received” option of the Preferences–>Calendar tab may give you just the behavior you’re looking for (see screenshot).

Take note of the “non-Exchange calendars only” snippet behind this option. Sadly, Entourage adds incoming meeting invites as tentative to your calendar only when you are connecting to a POP, IMAP, etc. type of mail account and not if you’re connecting to an Exchange mailbox.

The good news is that if you’re connecting to an Exchange 2007-based mailbox, the Exchange 2007 Calendar Attendant will  will do that for you and Entourage has nothing to do with that. The Calendar Attendant processes meeting requests as they come in, even if you are not currently logged on by means of Entourage,  Outlook or another client. Meetings are automatically placed on the calendar as tentative, so that timeslots will not be overbooked.

Having trouble viewing free/busy times when scheduling meetings in the Microsoft Entourage calendar? If you cannot see other people’s availability when inviting them to a meeting, you’ll want to confirm the following settings…

In short:

Microsoft Entourage Advanced Account Settings

In an Exchange environment when an Entourage 2004 user tries to schedule meetings with other users, availability information is retrieved using a WebDAV based query (Get /public/?Cmd=freebusy) to the Public Folder Server configured in your account settings under the advanced tab.

Entourage 2008 is able to also utilize ‘Exchange Web Services’ (available only on Exchange 2007 Server) to retrieve availability information. Public Folders are a feature of Microsoft Exchange Server that provide a way to collect, organize, and share information with others in an organization. Public folders are often used by project teams or user groups to share information about a common area of interest. You can use public folders in

Free/Busy Availability Scheduling in Microsoft Entourage

Entourage, to view and post messages, events and contacts. The Exchange server that stores Public Folders is also usually used to store users’ free/busy scheduling information. Having confirmed your Entourage Exchange account’s Public Folders Server field matches that of your Exchange Server, you should now be able to see other user’s calendar availability, assuming your organization stores this free/busy time information in the public folder.

You should also be able to see resource/conference room availability. For an example of how to reserve resources, including Cisco Telepresence rooms, see How-to Reserve a Conference Room in Entourage 2008.

Open Other User's Folder

Do you have trouble figuring out whether a co-worker’s calendar is free/busy when trying to schedule a meeting? If you’d like to view multiple Microsoft Entourage Calendars at the same time, here’s how.

First you’ll want to open the other user’s calendar by navigating to the File menu and selecting Open Other User’s Folder….

Next highlight the other user’s folder and either right-click, choosing Open… or press CMD+O at which point a second window will open with a view of the other user’s calendar.

Microsoft Entourage Caldendar View (Other User)

Microsoft Entourage Caldendar View

At this point, you should have two windows open, one with a view to your calendar and one with a view of the other user’s calendar. This is a convenient way to cross-check co-worker’s and other resource’s availabilities.

If you’re unable to see another user’s availability, you may want to see Troubleshooting Free/Busy Times in Microsoft Entourage.

How do I set Entourage to start on boot?

To have Microsoft Entourage automatically load when logging into Mac OS  X, you can check the “Open at Login” option by right-clicking

Entourage added to Login Items

How do I stop Entourage from starting at login?

Use the same tools listed above to prevent Entourage from auto starting at login (by deselecting “Open at Login” or removing Entourage from the list of applications in Login Items).

Entourage "Open at Login" Option

I removed Entourage from my Account’s Login Items list. Entourage still starts on login. What gives?

Another application is the likely culprit here. Applications with calendaring or scheduling functionality such as MenuCalendarClock are known to launch Entourage every time it checks for events. Some have found that Keyboard Maestro, Quicksilver, LaunchBar, iKey or EntourageABMenu have a similar effect on Entourage.

If you frequently receive email that needs to be followed-up with a meeting, here’s a Microsoft Entourage calendaring shortcut you’ll love – Create Event from Message.

The built-in Entourage script, Create Event from Message, creates a new calendar event (meeting invitation) using the subject and body of the currently open mail message (or the mail message that is currently focused on). So, whether you have a particular piece of mail open in its own window or have one highlighted, press Control+E (otherwise written as ^E) to activate the Create Event from Message script.

Let’s run through an example.

Say I received an email message like this:

Example Mail Message - Creating Calendar Events from Mail Messages

AppleScript to Create Calendar Event from Email in Entourage

and violá! A new calendar event pops-up with the a copy of the subject and body text from your mail message like so:

Example Calendar Event - Creating Events from Mail Messages

This shortcut has save me a good deal of time by relieving what is usually a manual copy-and-paste process to create new calendar event on the same topic of an email I’ve received.

When you install Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, My Day conveniently adds itself to your list of applications to start up at login and pops-up in the upper-right hand corner of your screen each time you log into your Mac. If you’d like to get prevent My Day from starting up at login there are a couple ways to get rid of it.

How to hide Entourage’s My Day:

1. To hide My Day, press Control+M.

How to turn off Entourage’s My Day:

1. Right-click (Ctrl+click) on the My Day icon in the dock, then uncheck Open at Login.
   …or, if this doesn’t work…
2. To prevent My Day from starting at login, open My Day preferences (CMD+, or the preferences icon in the bottom, right corner of My Day). Uncheck “Open at computer logon”.
   …or, if this doesn’t work…
3. Trash My Day’s plist file, com.microsoft.myday.plist, found under Hard Drive/Users/(your user)/Library/Preferences

System Preferences --> Accounts --> Login Items

To verify My Day has been turned off, open Login Items under Account in System Preferences.

My Day has a preference to either show its icon in the Dock or to show in the Mac OS menu bar. If you’re having difficulty getting one or the other preference to stick when changing the My Day icon location, note that your user account will need write permission to My Day’s Application folder found under /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office/My Day.app/. Admin user accounts have this write permission by default. Standard user account will have read-only permission to this folder.

Windows Explorer - Send to Mail Recipient

Are you a Windows-convert and miss the ability to right-click on a file and choose “Send to Mail Recipient”? Look no further, Automator is here. I can’t recall just how often I made use of Windows Explorer’s context menu selection “Send Mail to Recipient”, but know that it was enough to leave me wanting after switching to Mac OS X.

This article applies to OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and OS X 10.5 (Leopard), not OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

Here’s how you can use an Automator workflow to create this same functionality in OS X Finder’s context menu.

1. First, open Automator and choose to create a Custom workflow.
   

   New Automator Custom Workflow

2. Second, under the “Files and Folders” actions library, drag and drop Finder’s “Get Selected Items” to the righthand pane to begin building your workflow.
   

   Action - Finder Get Selected Items

3. Third, under the “Mail” actions library, drag and drop Entourage’s Create New Mail Message (or Mail’s New Mail Message, if you prefer) to the righthand window pane.
   

   Action - Create New Entourage Mail Message
4. Fourth, and finally, again under the “Mail” actions library, drag and drop Entourage’s Add Attachments to Entourage Message (or Mail’s Add Attachments to Front Message) to the righthand window pane
   

   Action - Add Attachments to Entourage Messages

   .

Workflow Context Menu Selection

Now that your workflow is complete, you’ll need to save it. I recommend first saving it as a “workflow”, so you can tweak it later if need be. Next, we’ll choose to save it as a Finder plugin, which will put your workflow plugin into ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder/

You can also save Automator workflows as applications (.app), however, doing so in this example would mean when you run the .app, Entourage will open and attach the .app file itself to your new mail message – not quite the intended use here.

The only two negatives I can speak of with regard to using Automator workflows are:

1. Automator workflows may take a few seconds to execute. An AppleScript version of the same workflow executes more quickly, but of course means you’ll have to code the automation rather than click your way through creating it.
2. The Automator workflows are three levels deep in the Finder context menu. This makes navigating your mouse to select your workflow precarious.

I can live with the extra few seconds to execute the workflow, but would love to see an automator workflow at the top level of the “More” contextual menu. Anyone know how this is done?

I have heard variations of this question asked over and over:

While Entourage does not support the same resource booking functionality that Outlook does, I’m able to successfully schedule conference rooms, including Cisco Telepresence rooms in Entourage by simply placing the resource’s address into the To: field of a meeting request. I’m able to view the resource’s availability beforehand just as I do for any other attendee (denoted by the orange rectangle). The resource in this sample event is “AST06-2-Luckenbach (16)”.

Entourage Resource Booking

The missing resource booking functionality here is:

1. the automatic entry of the resource name into the Location field (denoted by the yellow arrow)
2. the ability to use counter-proposals received by others who may wish to reschedule the meeting time. You need to do this manually.

Entourage Meeting Request Accepted

The environment setup here is:

1. Entourage 2008
2. Exchange 2003
3. Auto Accept Agent (not absolutely necessary, but highly recommended)

Contrary to what some might believe, your Exchange server does not need to be running the Auto Accept Agent for resource booking to work, but it sure is recommended. WIthout the Auto Accept Agent running, someone will have to manage meeting invitations manually for all resources.

I’m surprised others haven’t pointed out this functionality on how to schedule resources in Entourage out already. There seems to be many references pointing Entourage’s missing calendaring functionality. When I saw the University of Tennessee Knoxville IT department’s answer to “Can I schedule shared resources such as a conference room?” I was particularly humored.

This procedure works for scheduling Cisco Telepresence rooms, too. You simply need to reserve rooms at both ends of the call (or all ends of the call in the case of multipoint conferences). If you cannot view a resource’s availability when looking at the Scheduling tab, you may want to Troubleshoot Free/Busy Times in Microsoft Entourage.

The measly 350MB mailbox quota allotted by my corporate IT department has me being creative with the storage of my email. Many of the other information workers I know suffer the same plight. If you are a Microsoft Entourage (the Mac OS X cousin to Microsoft Outlook) like me and like to avoid paying for tools (like EEAX or MailSteward), I hope this how-to helps assuage your mail storage, archival and backup woes. In my opinion, how to Archive Your Data by Microsoft Entourage Help and other articles like “In Entourage, how do I archive my mail?” do a mediocre job of informing us about the caveats involved in archiving mail. The two native export options I’ll speak of are:

1. archive Entourage mail using mbox files
   • an mbox file contains a set of mail messages that you can import back into Entourage or into some other mail applications.
2. archive Entourage mail using .rge archives
   • an Entourage archive file (.rge) can contain email messages, contacts, events, notes, tasks, and project files.
   • .rge files have high compression ratios, which saves on your disk space.

I promulgate using the latter of these options to archive your Entourage mail is the solution of choice and here’s how I suggest doing so:

Suggested Solution

To clean up your mailbox in a comprehensive Time Machine and Spotlight-friendly way, use a combination of Mail Views (Saved Searches), a .rge archive and multiple identities. To ready your mail for archiving, you’ll first want to organize mail for export. Entourage will export data, but in a limited number of ways. One way to do this is by creating and assigning a category to your mail. Like others before me, I’ve chosen to archive my mail on an annual basis (I don’t know why, since I reach my mail quota well ahead of reaching the end of the year – I may need to archive every 6 months).

1. Use Categories to Organize Email for Export

Mail Views for Received and Sent Archives

I suggest creating two custom Mail Views (last group in the folders pane, below Microsoft News Server) one for Received Mail and for Sent Mail.

1. To create a mail view for Received Mail, select the folder you want to search in (probably your Inbox), then go to to Edit > Advanced Search (⌥⌘ F)
2. Set the option to “Match if any criteria are met”
3. From the dropdown, set “Date Received”
4. From the next dropdown, set “Greater Than” and then enter the preferred email age. This will find all email older than the specified number of days in the date received field. In the example screenshot, I was 151 days into the 365 day year when creating this archive.


Mail View to Archive Email by Date Sent

5. Entourage will find all the matching mail. Scroll through and make sure all the mail you want is in the view and from all the folders you wish to archive. Save the search.
6. Repeat steps 1-5 for your Sent Items using the parameters “Date Sent”, “Greater Than”, <number of days>”.

Setting Category on Entourage Mail

2. Create an “Archive” Category

Once you’ve verified these two mail views to filter out the mail you wish to archive, create a new category to put them in.

1. Go to Edit > Categories > Edit Categories and edit your categories to make an “Archive” category
2. Right-click on your Mail Views, then assign your new category “Archive” to those items.

3. Export Mail to .rge Archive

1. Go to File > Export
2. Select the option to export “Items that are in a category”.
3. Choose your custom “Archive” category. Then select the item types, mail, tasks, etc., that you want to archive

Export Entourage Mail to rge Archive

Delete Entourage Archived .rge Mail

4. Create Another Identity

If you want quick access to your archived mail, I suggest creating a new Identity that will allow you to quickly “Switch Identities” to view old mail.

Now you can switch back and forth between identities (Switch Identities ⌥⌘ Q) if you want to access an archive. Here’s why using the latter two solutions are a poor choice:

Alternative Solution

1. Create a custom Mail View you can drag any view out of Entourage to create an .mbox file of the messages in that view.

The message Received timestamp is lost on export.

Use a combination of Mail Views and MBOX file(s). Once your mail is organized into a categorical, meaningful saved searched, simply click and drag the view to your desktop. This creates an MBOX file (which can be opened with a text editor if you don’t mind reading through Internet headers in your mail and HTML converted to plain-text). Dragging mail to an MBOX file does not remove the mail from your mailbox. If you want to free up space in your mailbox, you’ll need to delete the contents of your Mail View separately.

Drag your MBOX files into a new Identity, then switch Identities to search old mail. This keeps your regular database lean and more responsive.