Product Reviews

Of all the Office 2004 applications, Entourage has gone through the biggest revamp. Not only does the already fully functional email and organisation application have more features, but it also sports a whole new sub-application for managing projects called Project Center. Microsoft has tweaked Entourage to make an already-compelling application even more so.

With any new email application the transition to the latest version can be a nerve-racking experience. Fortunately, this isn't the case when moving between Entourage X and 2004. Importing your existing setup gets off to a flying start, as Entourage gives you the option to transfer all the accounts it finds. It does this quickly and updated our Entourage X setup with more than 4000 emails in a very respectable two minutes. It also coped with all our rules and folders without error. Of the newly imported mail in the Inbox, any mail dated within the last couple of days was displayed as unread; otherwise, the installation was flawless.

Entourage's new default interface now offers a Preview pane, with plenty of space given over to the email. The sender and subject information sit across two lines in the middle of the window, while the body of the email can be increased and decreased easily using a button at the top of the preview section. Preview lets you add an email address directly to the Entourage address book or edit the sender's details by clicking the arrow next to the sender's name. If you're not ready to accept this change, the old List view is still available. The new three-panel approach to views makes it much easier to browse through a number of emails at once. You can now organise the entire inbox by the date an email was received. These views can be reduced so you can collapse an entire day, week or month's worth of email into a single line in your inbox. This makes it much quicker and easier to browse all your newer messages without

One really nice touch is a little box that appears in the bottom corner of the screen when you receive new mail. It displays the sender and subject line then fades away. It can do this above the current application or even your screen saver. You can also delete the mail directly from this pop-up window.

Microsoft has improved junk mail filtering, which now has four levels of security. The Exclusive setting requires the sender's email address to match an entry in your address book. The High setting filters all email with any less-than-savoury content - if friends email you with any obscenities in the body of a message, it will go straight into the Junk Mail folder. The Low setting catches all the most obvious spam, and None, obviously, turns off protection. When junk mail is detected, a screen pops up to let you know and to remind you to check the Junk Mail folder for anything that might have slipped into it by mistake. Junk mail is deleted every 30 days, but this can be set to whatever you want from one day upwards.

The impoved data export now has options to archive tasks, calendar events and notes, as well as contact details. We found it difficult to import vCards from Mac OS X's Address Book into Entourage, though, as you have to drag individual cards across to enter the data. Importing calendar data from iCal was the same, and individual entries had to be transferred manually, which was a real pain.

Address book mapping is now fully functional in Entourage 2004. Previously only available for US addresses, this feature allows you to click on a postcode and Entourage will provide you with a map and driving directions to that address. The calendar, tasks and notes options are still functionally the same as those in Entourage, but their interfaces have been redesigned.

Entourage is a versatile application and is extremely powerful when used to its full potential. There are so many options it's easy to get lost in just one of the Entourage modes. Luckily, the new design is easy to use and the interface change is subtle but welcome. The three-pane window for browsing email is simple to operate and makes browsing different accounts or large numbers of messages much easier. Overall, Entourage has been refined more than rebuilt, but the changes have really improved its usability.