How to Migrate your data from Microsoft Outlook to Mac Entourage

[Last Updated: Tuesday, 13-Jul-2010 16:56:13 EDT]

Overview

So you got yourself a shiny new Mac and were told it was a piece of cake to move all your data from your old Microsoft PC over or, alternatively, you were told you could run your Windows applications using Parallels or VMWare if you had to. Well, not so fast... Yes, most general data is easy to move. Data tied to a "proprietary" application, however, must be exported somehow, in order to be imported into a comparable Mac application, if you can export it properly at all. If you decide to use Parallels or VMWare be careful. I have found that Outlook seems to run like crap inside VMWare Fusion2 on Windows XP SP3. It would run well for 15 to 20 minutes and then it would appear to just hang with the hour glass and stop responding. This was not going to work for my wife. I tried it in Unity and Full desktop modes and it didn't seem to matter. There was just something wrong with it. So, I gave up on running Outlook inside VMWare and decided to move her over to a native application on the Mac.

FYI I have since determined that the slowness issues with VMWare Fusion2 were related to accessing the Outlook .pst file through a VMWare file share from the Windows desktop to the Mac filesystem. As long as the .pst file is contained within the virtual filesystem the application appears to perform properly.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft does not provide an easy way to extract and move your data out of Outlook to other applications using industry standard formats. You are limited to comma or tab-delimited files which won't work with email and is marginal at best for contact or calendar entries that include notes or comments that include carriage returns in the field. This presents what seems like a difficult issue to resolve.

Ideas that Didn't Completely Work

If you do a quick Google search looking for how to transfer your Mail, Addressbook, Calendar, and Tasks from Outlook to Entourage or even just other Mac applications, you will find quite a few links to a variety of applications that claim they will do the job for you. Some of these applications can take care of most of your data but you will spend anywhere from $10 to $30 to do this. These applications typically will extract your email into a .mbox file, your calendar into an iCal .ics file, and your addressbook into a vCard .vcf file. These are standard file formats that most organizer software packages support as a method for importing. Even Outlook supports importing these formats. They just do not provide a comparable export method. Gee, thanks Micro$oft.

So, after a spending almost a full day myself looking through and testing out the various little application available to help export Outlook data into a format I could import into Entourage 2008, I determined that none of the programs directly address Tasks or Note entries. My wife uses these features quite heavily and it was not an option to recreate this data manually. So, at this point I have found solutions that will get about 70% of the data migration completed out of Outlook.

The next idea I had was to try an online Exchange hosting service, thinking that I could connect the Outlook client and synch all its data to the server and then connect the Entourage client and pull all the data down. Everything appeared to work at first. After synching the data up to the server, I connected the Entourage client and then....nothing. It would never synch. After getting it all setup, I called support and found out the provider did not support the full Exchange IMAP client for Entourage. They only support the basic IMAP mode which is mail only.

The Solution

So, luckily, I happened upon a service called XC connect. This service allows individual users of Outlook, Entourage, Address Book/iCal, and Evolution to synchronize their calendar, contacts, and tasks. They offer a free 30 day evaluation of the service with up to 5 user accounts. So, I setup a demo account and downloaded the connector software to load on my virtual machine so I could synch the Outlook data. This process was smooth and very easy to complete. Once the data was synchronized, I shared the calendar,contacts, and tasks folders. I then setup a second test account and I downloaded the Mac connector application. I fired up Entourage and the connector immediately started synchronizing the data.

After all of my research and testing to get "all" of the Outlook data migrated into Entourage, I finally found a complete solution that doesn't cost anything and is easy to setup and configure.