Mac Office 2004 SP2

This past week, Microsoft released Service Pack 2 for Office 2004 for the Mac. Among the enhancements are significant improvements in the Entourage mail client. Some of these improvements are available after installing KB 888619 on Exchange 2003 or 892896 on Exchange 2000.

Improvements provided in Office 2004 SP2 include:

• Access to the Global Address list (GAL) from the Exchange server

• Assign delegates for mail, contacts, and calendar
• Improved Public Folder performance
• Password expiration notification
• View mailbox space usage against the quota

In short, it looks as though Entourage 2004 SP2 regains much of the functionality of Outlook 2001 for the Mac that was lost in previous versions of Entourage.

I’d been having some performance issues with Entourage that I was beginning to attribute to the performance of Exchange on my server. I installed SP2 on my primary machine, however, and those performance issues have disappeared. Given the significant improvements I’ve seen in my network after installing SP2, I’ll be getting the word out to my clients to install the update as quickly as possible.

Now, there has been some discussion about applying 888619 on SBS boxes recently. Susan summed up the scenario very nicely in a post on her blog. Bottom line, go ahead and apply the update, but be prepared to reboot your server for it to take effect, and if you installed Exchange 2003 SP1 but not the full SBS 2003 SP1, you may need to reapply 843539. Or just go ahead and install SBS 2003 SP1. You know you need to.