Problems Migrating from Entourage 2004 to All-Mac Apps (Mail, Address Bk)

Question

Greetings All,
Background: After careful consideration, I've moved from a Treo 650 and Entourage 2004 scenario to the new iPhone and all-Mac Apps platform.
It hasn't gone easily: lots of missing, critical data (below).
I don't understand why thousands of business people aren't posting about this: my data is invaluable, and compromised by chunks of it missing.
I have now spent about 15 hours researching this, and posted in several Google Groups. It's rather tedious, and I have lots of friendly people answering rather than people with answers. I like friendly people, but seriously, I'd rather have a hostile person who knows how to do this at this point.
I have read in several places of the scripts of a Paul Berkowitz called "Export-Import Entourage 1310," but the documentation provided doesn't make clear these issues are addressed.
I have written (five times) Mark/Space regarding their Missing Sync for the iPhone, but they have reading-comprehension issues, and I'm still not clear if they can get the notes from either my old Treo 650 via it into my iPhone.
Here is what is missing:
a) Can Paul's scripts (or anyone's!) re-export/merge Contacts such
that categorized/grouped are preserved? This is of great importance.
b) Will it export Entourage's notes, and will they be
correctly titled, and in a useful place on the iPhone? (I have about
400 notes), again categorized?
c) Any way to export my Entourage filters/rules to Apple's Mail?
d) Any way to export the large *mailing lists* (groups) I had in
Entourage to Apple's Mail?
Thank you in advance for your informed answers, and I must say that this has been as annoying as Apple thinking we can't figure that when AT&T raised the rates, the savings on the new phone was wiped out.
Think Better, Apple. If you're trying to get us to use your platform, document how to make the switch.
Thanks,
km

Answer 1

Hey Kevin, sorry for the deafening silence. I can trade you two possible solutions for your secret elegant solution, how about that?
It turns out I have done the exact same thing you've done: I'm going from Entourage 2004/Treo 680 to Apple apps/Toodledo/iPhone. (Getting rid of Entourage altogether has more to do with the difficulty of using Entourage for my small business on the Mac than the iPhone switch.)
So, there are 2 Applescripts available that deal with moving contact groups and categories to the Mac Address Book.
The first is a script from Paul Berkowitz called Sync-Entourage Address Book. This script was developed before Microsoft turned on Sync Services within Entourage, and was intended to fill that gap. It purportedly can copy over contacts, categories and groups from Entourage to Address Book. It has special features for handling both categories and groups simultaneously. The latest version available is from Feb. 2006, and purports to work with Panther and Tiger, but there's no info on whether it works with Leopard. Also, there's no telling whether it will work simultaneously with Apple sync services. (I would guess not.) Berkowitz is not answering emails or responding in Microsoft forums anymore; according to one of the other Entourage MVPs, he is too busy with his day job, so this is apparently all the information there is. If you want to take a chance, the script is here:
http://homepage.mac.com/WebObjects/FileSharing.woa/69/wo/1XKAw6Pv2qUMw3xZ.1/0.2. 1.2.26.31.97.9.35.0.1.1.1?user=berkowit28&fpath=Sync%20Entourage-Address%20Book& templatefn=FileSharing.html
There is another (free!) Applescript from a guy named Jon Nathan called Sync Entourage & AB Groups, that syncs Groups only. It is designed to work with Apple Sync Services, and Nathan has written me that it is up-to-date and does work with Leopard. He also wrote me that you can get an idea of how long it will take in this fashion:
"If you open the script in the Script Editor, switch to the "Event Log" tab
at the bottom of the script window, then run the script from here by
clicking the "Run" button, you can watch in real time as it processes your
contacts and you can get a sense of how long it will take to process your
contacts. This will take some time with that many contacts & groups so it's
probably best to run it while you can do something else like eat lunch."
Nathan's script is available here:
http://www.jonn8.com/html/SyncEntourageABGroups.html
So, some answers to your questions about note exporting from Entourage:
For tasks and notes, I decided to use two iPhone apps from a company called Appigo: Todo and Notebook. Both apps store tasks and notes locally on the iPhone, interact with each other, and can sync to a Web service called Toodledo. Toodledo can import CSV files to their (under-featured, hopefully to be improved) Web notebook, and from there, you can bring them into Notebook on the iPhone. (Notebook works great on the iPhone and you will be loving it a lot more that the Memo app on your Palm, trust me.) In Toodledo, Todo and Notebook, you use folders in place of the categories you had in Entourage, for both tasks and notes.
Unfortunately, I had a very frustrating time getting my 300+ notes out of Entourage using Berkowitz's import-export scripts, but I did figure it out, and can save you some time if your interested. (You will need TextWrangler in addition to the Berkowitz scripts.)
As far as tasks go, I only have about 30, so it was no big deal to enter them by hand in Toodledo and bring them onto the iPhone with Todo. (FYI, Toodledo's basic Web service is free, you pay an annual subscription fee if you want your stuff encrypted on their servers.)
The Toodledo developer has an active forum, and the Appigo guys have Google Groups for both apps. Both Appigo and Toodledo respond directly and quickly to feature requests, questions, etc.
So how's that? What you got for me?