Microsoft really is hard at work on Entourage's SyncServices update

It doesn't look like it's going to materialise soon, but an update to Entourage that will work with OS X 10.4's SyncServices is on the way.

Why's that important? Because SyncServices enables a program to synchronise its data with OS X's Address Book, .Mac, mobile phones and other devices. Enable SyncServices in Entourage and Entourage data will pop up on your phone every time you sync it, without any extra effort.

Want some evidence? How about this from the Sync Services Mailing List (yes, I subscribe):

From: Jud Spencer
I'm new to the sync services game. I essentially started with 10.4.3. I have
found that in a case where you are pushing a subset of entities related to a
parent, that you need to provide the ID's of all the sub-entities in the
parent, not just the ones that are being pushed. What we are doing in our
app is keeping track of the entities when we have a schema incompatibility,
and then pushing them on any update. For example, our app only supports two
addresses. When we pull a record with more than two, we keep track of the
ids of the ones that we accepted but didn't write to our database.

A PIM that only supports two addresses? Entourage, no?

Not convinced? Okay, the secret knowledge you need is that Jud Spencer is a Microsoft employee and one of the developers of Claris EMailer. He later joined Microsoft where he co-developed the Mac version of Outlook Express, which became the basis of Entourage.

Worryingly, Spencer says that he's only just started on the Sync Services update with 10.4.3. Microsoft had previously claimed that it had been unable to include SyncServices support in its most recent update to Entourage because of bugs in SyncServices that Apple would need to fix. There are plenty of bugs in SyncServices, but if Spencer's only just started work, how would Microsoft know about them? We could always assume that Spencer's late in coming to the SyncServices team but if 10.4.3 fixes the bugs, surely it's just a matter of testing the update against 10.4.3, rather than new development?

Anyway, by the looks of it, it's going to be at least the New Year before the update becomes available. But there's hope. Real hope.

Technorati Tags: Entourage, Macs, Microsoft, PDAs, SyncServices