As a follow-up to Patrick’s post, we thought we would discuss a bit about Entourage and “Categories”….

If you’ve ever used Outlook or Mac OSX Address Book/iCal you are familiar with the way data is separated according to “folder”, “group”, or “calendar”. Entourage on the other hand, approaches things a little different – it uses “categories” and that is what becomes the discriminating factor between records.

If you are used to working with Entourage, you may have setup for yourself a process for working with Categories, and it actually works quite nicely. Categories allow you to organize your records, calendar, address book, tasks (and even email) and then enable you to filter a view on just what you want to see – it’s pretty handy.

The challenge comes when wanting to share your Entourage calendar, address book, and/or tasks – To our knowledge there aren’t that many sharing/synchronization solutions out there that synchronize categories. In fact, we are told by users that XC Connect is the *only* solution they have found that synchronizes categories, period.

To take it a step further, XC Connect allows an Entourage user to apply more than one category to a record and synchronize those multiple categories. To make it even a bit more tantalizing, XC Connect allows you to create what we call a “folder” (aka a “data container”) on the XCN Server with the same name as your Category, and it allows XC Connect to synchronize that data on your computer that is tagged with that Category – and if you have other Categories attached to it, it will sync those as well! And this is not limited to just “one” Category – you can share multiple Categories – there is no limit!

Apparently no other sharing/synchronization solution allows that – we’re not sure why.

And if you have other users on Outlook, yes, those categories will synchronize to the “category” field in Outlook.

Bear in mind that there are almost endless ways for users to manage their data and almost certainly XC Connect will not satisfy every single method – but we try hard to make XC Connect a flexible solution in order to provide you with a solution that helps you share your data.

If you have any questions, please let us know – contact us at info@xcnetwork.com. Thanks!