Congrats to Entourage for SyncServices and Spotlight support!

Sheesh! I’ve been so busy here at Windows Live Toolbar that I haven’t been able to blog about the latest release of Microsoft Entourage.

Fortunately, others have!

Jud has a great summary here that ends with this:

11.2.3 may not sound like the version number of a major release, but the features that it provides and the ones that it will enable that we didn’t think of make it very exciting for this Entourage user.

Omar found some good press about it in TidBits. That’s very surprising to me! I sort of figured that until Entourage became a port of Eudora, that it would never receive any glowing praise. [I kid, I kid].

The two major features of Entourage for this release is Spotlight support and SyncServices. My Office 2004 updated last night (yes I still have a Mac) with no problem through Automatic Updates.

To those who say that Office for Mac is expensive - I hope that as you use these two new features which are available for free, you can see that Microsoft is comitted to continually adding more value to your software. These two features been in progress for a long long time now.

I’ll never forget the MacWorld NY on July 17th, 2002 when Apple introduced iCal and iSync. In part, because that was my birthday - but also because of all the discussion it generated about sharing data across applications.

For years the Entourage team received complaints that we were “locking user’s data in” by not supporting iSync. Well, it wasn’t until just the most recent OS update that SyncServices became a mature enough API for our usage. We worked on this at the same time that we dramatically improved our Exchange support. Man we got a lot done in FY05/FY06!
I heard on the blogosphere today that Marc Canter yelled a comment at Bill Gates about opening APIs and letting apps share data. Microsoft Entourage is well on that way already.

For example, a major 3rd party recently IM’ed me to say that this new support for SyncServices is great. Now his product/service can integrate with Entourage, without any extra work! His company has long wanted to integrate with Entourage because of its great customer base, and now they can. Wow! [BTW, can I mention your name and your company?]

So congrats to everyone who worked on this. I know it was tough, but doable. Great work guys.