Bad News for Blackberry Users and Syncing to Entourage

If you install Microsoft Office for Mac 2011, your ability to sync with Entourage using Pocket Mac will break.

Here is an email send to me from Pocket Mac:

     First of all, I wanted to let you know we're hard at work on our update for Microsoft Office 2011. 

     On December 15, we'll be shipping free MS Office updates for PocketMac for BlackBerry. Again, this update will be completely free and available to all PocketMac for BlackBerry customers. That's the good news. Now for the not-so-good news...

      ...Microsoft has decided, for reasons not completely clear to me, to limit what Outlook 2011 syncs. This means with the latest release, they're allowing only contacts to sync. This means for the foreseeable future:

      (*) no calendar sync

      (*) no tasks sync and

      (*) no notes sync. 

      For more on their decision, you can check out this MS Office for Mac blog post. The post specifically says, "...you’ll find sync support for your contacts through Sync Services. We do understand that Calendar sync is important and are working on it now." Not the best news, I know. With that in mind, though, here's what I'd recommend:

      1) Hold off on upgrading until Microsoft launches calendar synching or full synching capabilities.

      2) Download our update on December 15 with the knowledge that it will only sync your contacts. 

     Know this though: whenever Microsoft releases their updates and allows the synching of more items, we'll support them. We will provide a contacts plugin for Outlook 2011 initially, and, if/when Outlook supports calendar, etc. sync, we will provide free updates for that data, too. 

     And of course, we still have rock-solid support for Entourage 2008 included in the current version of PocketMac for BlackBerry. 

Thank you,

Tim Goggin

VP

PocketMac