Entourage: "Now updating..." and beachballs

[Morgan19]

I'm running OSX (10.3.6) and Entourage 2004, hooked up to a server with Exchange on it.

I have "synchronize with server" turned off so I'm not sure what's happening, but every few minutes or so I'll get the beachball (only in Entourage) and it only seems to happen when it says "Now updating XYZ" in the bottom right corner, where XYZ is the Inbox, Sent items, or other folders I have set up in the program. It's more than a little annoying to be typing an email message when all of a sudden the cursor will freeze, turn to a beachball, and then a five or six seconds later will finally resume what I've typed. My questions are:

1) Anyone know why it's beachballing? I'm guessing it's something about communicating with the server.

2) What is the "Now updating..." function, and is it necessary?

m19

 

[tmckeown]

Entourage, when it is setup to work with exchange, runs the update on each folder accoeding to it's own schedule. I too have many complaints from people here who hate how Entourage freezes while updates are happening. Did you ever get any resolution to your problems? I'm tempted to just get the boss his own PC for email and say "screw the Macs". Entourage has some serious issues that drive our people crazy, and I get the brunt of their displeasure.

 

[rliebsch]

I would recommend going back to Outlook 2001 for Macintosh. I know it runs in Classic, but it works. Mail sends and receives instantaneously. All Calendar events update properly, be it additions, subtractions, modifications, or deletions. Tasks and Notes are synchronized.

This is all especially important considering we also have Blackberry Handhelds.

Needless to say, my users are not happy,but from what I have found other admins doing: Entourage is unreliable, causes serious degradation of service, and congests the network.

I have 60+ Mac users with Exchange 2000. Entourage is horrible. Outlook for Mac works.

 

[devastator]

I run Entourage on a small network with no issues at all. I use to get the beachball and lock up issues when i wasn't actually part of the SBS 2003 network but since adding admit mac to our 10 macs and actually logging into the network we haven't had any problems. You can do this obviously without admit mac with the directory services.

Just stating that that fixed our issues.

I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. ~ Baggins