Since switching from Apple Mail to Entourage 6 months ago things have been running very well. When I am working away from the office I communicate with everyone using Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac and nobody really knows. While in the office I use Office2003, but outside of the office I rarely use anything other than my PowerBook.

Although Entourage is running very well, there are a few things that Microsoft could do to make my life a little easier. The Calendar is close, but Outlook has a couple features that I want in Entourage.

• The first feature is the ability to look at my Calendar from a Meeting Request. Let me explain a little better – in Outlook, when I receive a Meeting Request, I can Accept, Deny, Propose a new time, or view my Calendar at the time of the meeting request. When I click on Calendar from the meeting request it will let me see my Calendar at the time of the meeting. That way I can see what else I have going on then and determine if this meeting is more important that something else I may have booked. Very handy and I’d like to see that in Entourage.
• Letting me know if I have a conflict with the meeting request from inside the meeting request itself. In Outlook I can see this info and I’d like to see it in Entourage.
• The ability to forward a meeting request. There are times when I cannot make a meeting, or I need someone to attend for me, so I will either ask the meeting requester to invite that person or I will forward the meeting invitation myself. I don’t see how to do that using Entourage and I would like that feature.
• A Today button in the Calendar view. I realize I can go to the View Date button and today’s date is there, but I’m spoiled by Outlook2003 and would like 1 less click. Even though I can use the key combination of Command-T, I still want the button.
• Lastly is the size of the cached email database. It gets pretty large quickly (well over 1GB) and things seem to get a little slower as the database grows. Not a show stopper, but something that would be nice to have.

Other than these few things I still believe Entourage is a very good email client and pretty much a must-have if you want to use a Mac in an Exchange environment.