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ascottascott 

Pocketsoap to help integrate Entourage with Salesforce

>I am getting my small firm up to speed on Salesforce, but am hoping
>for a quick tutorial on pocketsoap to allow me to fully integrate my
>Entourage with my salesforce activites. I have downloaded maildrop,
>and it seems to work fine (although I occasionally get a 'malformed
>search' message - perhaps because the contact is not in salesforce?).
>
>I am running Mac OS 10.4.9, and entourage 2004 11.3.3.
>
>Specific questions:
>
>What is the differences between outlook addition and what I will get
>with pocketsoap?
>
>I read that the information was all 2 way. How much info will move
>from Salesforce into my Entourage program? Is this all contacts,
>calendar and emails? My entourage already is very large (over 3GB) and
>occasionally freezes up.
>
>Is there a way to mark records private vs business?
>
>Will installing pocketsoap effect my ability to sync my Entourage with
>my Palm Treo?
>
>I am excited to fully integrate my activities with Salesforce, but I
>am concerned about what might happen to my Entourage when i first do
>the download and the sync. I will do a backup first, but any
>reassurances or tips would be appreciated.
>
>Thanks for your help.
>Andy

SuperfellSuperfell
If you get a malformed search, can you let me know the exact email address you were searching for and i'll fix that, it shouldn't happen.

Outlook Edition consists primarily of 2 things. Contact & Calendar 2 way sync, and tools to add emails from Outlook to salesforce.

Maildrop provides the add email to saleforce feature, Maildrop does no automatic syncing of emails, you have to select which emails you want to add to salesforce.

SF3 provides the contact & calendar sync features to address book & iCal. Once your contacts are in address book, you can enable the entourage feature to sync contacts to address book (note that due to way both entourage and sf3 manage calendars, you can't get salesforce -> entourage calendar syncing yet).

SF3 will sync all your contacts from address book (and entourage if that's turned on) into salesforce, and it will sync either all the contacts you own, or all contcts in saleforce backdown to address book. (the own vs all selection is in the SF3 preferences). The own vs all is the only subset currently supported, at some point in the future, i'll probably support sync'ing a subset of your mac's contacts by syncing just an address group, rather than the entire address book.

I don't have access to a trio so can make no promises one way or the other, it should be fine, but various sync tools don't follow the sync services rules correctly, which can cause problems (and entourage is a big rule breaker for sync services).

As a reminder SF3 is still in beta, you should make sure you have backups in place, and understand exactly how to restore them if needed.

RupRup
Andy,

For any serious sync testing on the Mac, I suggest you create a specific user.
You might then want to copy over your Entourage setup from your own user to your test user.
Delete the user when tests are finished, and fire up syncing with pocketsoap on your own user.

Rup
ascottascott
Simon,
Thanks for your helpful comments. I must still haven't taken the plunge to try out pocketsoap for several reasons:
- At one point i tried to set up Sync Services in the preferences area of Entourage, but I remember it took a long time/slowed things down to do the syncs as I have many contacts (nearly 3000) and many calendar events. Is this typical?
- I was also concerned that a) all of my personal contacts would automatically be put into public view on Salesforce, and then b) many or all of my contacts (assuming i selected 'own' in SF3 preferences) would be brought back down into my entourage as duplicates leading to a even more cumbersome Entourage database. Am I missing something here?
- I was bummed to see that there is currently no way to sync Entourage with the SF calendar. Do you see this ever changing?

I am still hopeful to stay on Entourage and that it will live in harmony with my activities in Salesforce, but right now i am still having to input data into my Address book & Calendar in Entourage as well as in Salesforce (I still need an email client that will allow me to sync contacts/calendar to my handheld Treo). I would prefer to not have to look at trying to run Outlook on my Mac using Parallels or some other program in order to get the full sync capabilities.

Thanks for your comments and work in this area.
Andy
MACFriendlyMACFriendly
To sync Entourage to SF through SF3 will I have to firt sync Entourage to Address Book and then sync Address Book to SF?
SuperfellSuperfell
Yes, the Mac sync model is hub'n'spoke, AB is the hub.
AmyJoAmyJo
Andy,

You may have learned this already, but you can set your entourage up to sync with address book automatically, this way you don't have to input separately.

Open General Preferences > Sync Services.


AJ
aussie6aussie6
i am having the following problem and error message when i try to sync - would be great with some inputs to help me with this:
NSPlaceholderMutableString initWithString:] nil argument

thanks
anders

SuperfellSuperfell
What version of OSX? at which point exactly does it appear? is there anything in the console log? what entities are you trying to sync?