Synching Entourage Between Air and MBP

[Macnanimous]

I'm contemplating buying the MBA. As a frequent traveler, i find myself on the road about 50% of the year, the thin form-factor and weight savings would be a blessing. But there's one thing i'm concerned with, synching my email between my travel machine (MBA) and my home machine (MBP).

I currently use Entourage 2008 w/ a POP mail account. When i'm home I'd prefer to use my powerhouse MBP, but how can i maintain my email/contacts/calendar on both machines? Is there some fancy synching I could do w/ Timemachine when its available? Can I just copy the main identity folder back and forth? Is there an easy way to do that.

Suggestions appreciated.

Macnanimous

 

[rsbell]

Sync through 4smartphone.net.

You can set it up to pull your email from the POP account, then retrieve your email from your iPhone. You DO have an iPhone, right?

While you can't sync the iPhone wirelessly to the Exchange Server at 4smartphone.net (yet!), everything else will sync (contacts, address book), and all your machines will be in sync.

 

[barnetda]

I am also interested in how we do this as i am in exactly the same position.

I think one way could be to leave the emailon the server when collecting email on the mac book air. That way when your MBP collects mail it will remove it form server and it will be on both machines BUT that doesnt help for sent mail.

As for addresses and cal i think it can be done via the Iphone .

 

[bjdraw]

I thought the only reason to use Entourage on a Mac was so it would work with an Exchange server?

Seems like Mail.app would be better for a POP account especially considering you can sync it with .mac to your other mac.

 

[whenders0n]

my advice: forward all your mail through gmail and use IMAP. you get awesome spam control thrown in for free. that way you can keep your old email address and your machines will all be in sync.

 

[rsbell]

my advice: forward all your mail through gmail and use IMAP. you get awesome spam control thrown in for free. that way you can keep your old email address and your machines will all be in sync.

This doesn't help the OP for his Calendar and Address Book. He will need a hosted Exchange Server for that, like 4smartphone.net or similar site.

OP: You can also use .Mac as well. I have used both, and am right now using .Mac and syncing 4 machines, an iPhone, and am publishing my calendar online so I can check it at any time.

 

[whenders0n]

This doesn't help the OP for his Calendar and Address Book. He will need a hosted Exchange Server for that, like 4smartphone.net or similar site.

OP: You can also use .Mac as well. I have used both, and am right now using .Mac and syncing 4 machines, an iPhone, and am publishing my calendar online so I can check it at any time.

ah i didn't notice that he wanted that as well. busysync will solve the calendar issues but i don't know about address book - there's always ABGMerge if you want to sync via Gmail. You could also use a mobile phone, ipod, etc as the intermediary device. Otherwise it might be a .mac account...

 

[Macnanimous]

Thanks for the suggestions. To answer some of the replies, i'm not using Mail.app because I do quite a lot in email (categorized emails, processed folders, entourage projects) and Exchange is out because half of my company are Linux guys who would rather die a horrible death than install an Exchange server.

I'm going to look into getting an exchange account at an ASP provider as suggested above.

 

[DaLurker]

In previous years I used to use a desktop and laptop combination and found trying to keep consistent information between machines to be a pain. Going to laptop only solved so many problems for me.

In recent days I've been thinking about a MBA to augment my MBP as well but once again the problem of syncing information arises.

My own proposed solution is as follows:

1) Use an IMAP email address. gmail in particular is excellent and will allow me to keep emails in sync across multiple machines and my iPhone.
2) Use .MAC. I recently purchased a 1 year subscription to .MAC and found syncing address book and calendars to be fantastic.

Now I still haven't solved the issue of having a copy of the most recent files I'm working with. I'm hoping somebody would have a file synchronization tool out there like Synctoys for Windows.

If they have an utility like that, it will help you sync your entourage since you just have to copy your Main Identify folder.

In short, keeping data consistent across multiple machines is a pain in the ass and I wish you the best of luck in finding a good solution!

 

[rsbell]

In previous years I used to use a desktop and laptop combination and found trying to keep consistent information between machines to be a pain. Going to laptop only solved so many problems for me.

In recent days I've been thinking about a MBA to augment my MBP as well but once again the problem of syncing information arises.

My own proposed solution is as follows:

1) Use an IMAP email address. gmail in particular is excellent and will allow me to keep emails in sync across multiple machines and my iPhone.
2) Use .MAC. I recently purchased a 1 year subscription to .MAC and found syncing address book and calendars to be fantastic.

Now I still haven't solved the issue of having a copy of the most recent files I'm working with. I'm hoping somebody would have a file synchronization tool out there like Synctoys for Windows.

If they have an utility like that, it will help you sync your entourage since you just have to copy your Main Identify folder.

In short, keeping data consistent across multiple machines is a pain in the ass and I wish you the best of luck in finding a good solution!

Save everything to your iDisk, and have it automatically sync to all of your computers. This will allow you to have access to all the files by all of your machines at any time. The beauty of iDisk is that you have a copy of it on your local machine, then when you have internet access, it will automatically sync to your iDisk on .Mac, which will then sync to all of your other machines.

Look here.

 

[bwiley]

Syncing your info between MBP and MBA

There is an outstanding program out there called ChronoSync. Costs $30 bucks, and is one of my most used utilities. Not only can you keep all of your documents synced, but I also use it to sync my iTunes and iPhotos libraries across the four MBP's and iMACs I have in my house right now. I download a song from iTunes on one, and automatically all four of my MACs have it. I also use it to sync my private/family calendars that I maintain in iCal that I don't like having on my company's exchange server, for which I use Entourage. Basically, I haven't found a single thing/scenario that you can't sync with it.

Works fine over WiFi, so will be perfect for the MBA. You can schedule the syncing to happen in the backround - configure it to just sync sub-folders within your documents rather than everything, etc. You can also set up exclusions within sub-folders to exclude specific documents, or excluse specific sub-sub-folders, etc.

So, if you have a lot of documents on your MBP but only want to sync folders and documents related to specific work between your MBP and your MBA in order to conserve that precious little storage space (I ordered the SSD), I don't think there is anything better you can go out and download for $30.

Great software. I have no affiliation with these guys other than as a satisfied customer. Takes about 15 minutes to figure out how to use it. Have fun!