Experience with Mac Office 2004 Update

I installed the Mac Office 2004 Update 11.2.3 last night, wanting to see the Spotlight integration and Entourage syncing with .Mac. After installing the update, I repaired disk permissions and kicked off a sync with .Mac. Things didn’t go too smoothly though. Initially, I got expected warnings to deconflict contact information between Entourage and Address Book. No surprises there. Then I got a few strange error messages that I unfortunately didn’t write down. Something about inconsistent data and telling me to sync with a computer with good data. Kinda scary.

But even with these repeated errors, syncing seemed to eventually work since I saw changes to my contact info in Entourage (and Address Book). To be on the safe side, I repaired disk permissions once again. Since then, I haven’t got any sync errors.

In all fairness though, I didn’t follow good troubleshooting techniques since I had also installed the info management app, Yojimbo, and was trying to use its .Mac syncing feature as well.

Now that the update is installed, syncing works and Spotlight can search my Entourage data. I’ve found some old forwarded emails in Entourage using Spotlight with keywords I remembered in the email.

But I’m getting used to configuring Spotlight and .Mac syncing via the System Preferences. Seems like for Spotlight, Entourage email searching is clumped together with Mail Messages searching which is represented by the Apple Mail icon and for syncing, I’m guessing Entourage contact syncing is part of Contacts syncing, represented by the Mac OS X Address Book icon? For syncing, there is a new entry to sync Entourage notes however.

Bottom line is that the features in the update works.

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