Entourage Migration

Entourage Migration
As many might have noticed, on Apple Discussions I've been an adamant proponent of shifting away from Entourage. It has a serious issue that it saves all your documents in a single database file. This database file if it becomes corrupted means rebuilding, which can take the better part of a day if successful. If not successful, you will have lost all your e-mail, contacts, and calendar entries in Entourage. I've gotten to a point in using Entourage where this has happened, and no attempt to restore it from the original document was successful. I've submitted a bug report to Microsoft, the developer of Entourage and over two years has passed and they still use this all your eggs in one basket approach. For those who want to move away from Entourage, Apple's Mac OS X Mail now offers support for IMAP, Exchange, and POP. A plugin even offers Hotmail support on Mac OS X Mail. To migrate your data from Entourage, the following steps are necessary.
Addressbook entries can be dragged to a folder on the desktop thus creating a VCF or VCard file. Apple's Addressbook program can then import Entourage's Addressbook contents.
Calendar entries can be migrated over with Sync Entourage iCal, or Exchange to iCal conversion in GoupCal.
Additional iCal/Mail integration is covered the two documents in Mac OS X help WR36 and ML1118.
Mail will import mail folders and attachments that are stored locally on the hard drive for Entourage as long as Entourage is still on your system. Go to Mail's File menu -> Import Mail Boxes, and it will let you select Entourage to import from.
While categories of Entourage are not transferred, you can create up to 8 categories of Mail labels using Labels for Mail Application
Adding a system wide script menu with a scroll icon is necessary to get some of these programs to work. Double click the file in System -> Library -> CoreServices -> Menu Extras called Script Menu.menu to enable it.

If there is a feature of Mail, Addressbook, or iCal you are missing from Entourage, feel free to leave me feedback on my e-mail on my guestbook page, and I'll see if I can find out if the feature exists, or is one you need to suggest to Apple Feedback. I've also got a list of Mac OS X Native software search engines, and listing of frequently used crossplatform software titles. which may have other alternative titles of software that you didn't know exist for Mac OS X.