In an earlier article
<julianvREMOVE_THIS_PART-9FFA8A.02431623042008@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
I re****ted that my Entourage database showed symptoms of corruption
after an upgrade from Office 2004 to 2008. It looks like there are
other people seeing database problems after this upgrade.
I tried the solution recommended by Diane Ross, manually im****ting my
2008 database into a new identity, as described in the instructions she
maintains on this page:
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/im****t_ex****t/manual_04_08.html>
I ex****ted all items from my 2008 database to an Entourage archive (.rge
file). I then quit Entourage, removed the Main Identity folder, and
restarted Entourage to create a new Main Identity. Then I im****ted
data from the archive.
Diane has probably not tested her instructions on an IMAP account. On
my first connection to my IMAP account, Entourage downloaded duplicates
of all the messages that had already been fully downloaded into the
database.
But far more troubling is the amount of data that was lost in this
manual rebuilding process.
Entourage preferences were lost and had to be re-entered.
Email account settings were lost (I have two accounts, one is POP and
the other is IMAP).
Schedules were lost.
Rules were lost.
UI display settings (column and sort settings, toolbar customizations,
etc.) were lost.
Custom categories were lost. This one is a killer for me, because I
have been using categories and colors to label several types of
im****tant calendar events and contacts, facilitating quicker searches
over years of appointments and hundreds of contact cards. My color
choices were also lost, replaced by Microsoft's standard pastel colors,
some of which are very hard to read in text on a white background.
Messages in my email folders are sorted by received date. For all the
im****ted emails in my POP account, the received dates were lost,
replaced by today's date.
I don't use links, but I think that this data is lost, too.
This project has taken several hours so far, and I'm not close to
restoring the lost information. Much of it probably cannot be restored
with any reasonable amount of manual work. I'm debating whether to keep
running with this gutted database. The alternative is to go back to my
former database, and live with the occasional corruption glitches,
hoping that it does not fail catastrophically. Perhaps the next update
to Entourage will include an improved database repair capability, which
can fix the problems that users are seeing when im****ting from 2004.
Diane, do you know if that's likely to happen?
By the way, my griping is not meant to disparage the work of Diane and
the other MVPs who have been putting extraordinary effort into helping
users in this forum. I am, however, disappointed with the coders and
managers who work on Entourage. I think this product has become too
complex and bloated, buggy, hard to maintain. The 2008 version was
released before it was ready.
--
Julian Vrieslander
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