EntourageABMenu is a convenient and intuitive way to utilize your Microsoft Entourage address book data through a system-wide menu. The application provides quick access to your contacts’ phone numbers, email, postal addresses, URLs, and notes. Selecting a menu item will trigger an action such as displaying the content in large type, copying it to the clipboard, creating a new email, dialing the phone (accomplished by running a customizable AppleScript), or showing an address on a map using any of several online mapping services. Phone dialing requires the use of additional software such as Dialectic. EntourageABMenu is fully-functional trialware. However, until you register, you are limited to using EntourageABMenu for only 30 minutes at a time and when it is launched you will receive a notice asking you to register and pay the registration fee. If you find EntourageABMenu useful—and we hope you will—please consider paying the nominal registration fee. Once registered, the initial dialog will no longer be displayed and the 30-minute trial period limitation is removed.

Please contact us with any comments, requests, or bugs that you encounter. Your help to make this an even better product is greatly appreciated. This is just one of our many applications available for download—and many of them are free! To see our other work, click here.

Installation

Simply copy EntourageABMenu to your Applications folder (or anywhere, really), and launch. The first time you open EntourageABMenu, the preferences window will also open. On subsequent launches, EntourageABMenu will just open its main menu (and the launch status window if you have kept this option enabled in the preferences).

Usage

When you launch EntourageABMenu it will parse your Entourage contacts and then build a new menu in the menu bar that includes your address book data in a variety of ways (alphabetically, by company, geographically, and by category—you can optionally enable/disable any of these menus and reorder them in the preferences). When you browse the menu you can see your contacts’ phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, URLs, and notes (again, you can enable/disable and reorder these items in the preferences). Selecting one of these data items will trigger an action (specified in the preferences) such as displaying the data in a large type window, creating a new email, dialing the phone, displaying on a map provided by an online mapping service (several options are available in the preferences), etc. Holding down the Option key when selecting any menu item should open the selected contact in Entourage (you may need to press and hold the option key before you start to browse the menu).

The initial data load relies on communicating with Entourage via AppleScript and, as such, may take a few minutes depending on the speed of your machine and the amount of data in your address book (it also requires Entourage to be open so, if Entourage isn’t open when EntourageABMenu retrieves the data, it will be launched). For users with extremely large address books (2,000+ contacts), the data load could take several minutes. To minimize the data load delay, on subsequent loads you can limit the data that the application uses to only include contacts in a specific category.

To further minimize the launch time, you can also enable the option to use a data cache. When the cache is enabled, once EntourageABMenu has loaded data from Entourage initially, it will use this original data when building its menus, even when the application is re-launched. If you want to force the data to be re-cached, you can select the option to “Reload Data Now” either from the main menu or from the preferences. When using the data cache, EntourageABMenu will not reload its data automatically and clicking on the Exchange accounts or category popup menus in the preferences will also use the cached data (when the cache is not enabled, clicking on either of these menus will query Entourage for the most up-to-date information). Also, when the cache is enabled, EntourageABMenu will not automatically launch Entourage (a caveat to this is if you have set Entourage as your default mail client and use an action in EntourageABMenu to create a new email; if this is the case Entourage will be launched when you trigger an email action). Also, if you switch identities from the EntourageABMenu utilities menu, the data will be reloaded from Entourage.

You can also disable the launch window so EntourageABMenu will unobtrusively load in the background with only a small spinning progress indicator visible in the menu bar. To stay current with your data, you can have the application rebuild its cache of contact data from Entourage on a recurring schedule.

If you have an Exchange account where you store your address book, EntourageABMenu can be configured to use the contacts stored there instead of the ones contained in your local address book. If you do not have any Exchange accounts defined in Entourage, this option will be disabled. When clicking on the Exchange account drop down menu, EntourageABMenu will query Entourage for available accounts (and, consequently, if Entourage is not launched when this happens, EntourageABMenu will launch it — this behavior is the same when clicking on the categories drop down menu), if one or more accounts are found, then the Exchange account option will be enabled. When using contacts from your Exchange account you can still limit the contacts that are included in EntourageABMenu to those in a specific category.

By default, EntourageABMenu will create several submenus to present your contact data alphabetically, by category, by company, geographically, and an uncategorized menu that includes all of your contacts. Using the preferences, you can enable or disable any of these submenus and reorder them (Mac OS X 10.4+). Similarly, you can enable and disable any of the data items (email, phone numbers, postal addresses, URLs, and notes) and reorder them. Note: if you disable all of the submenus and/or all of the data items, of course, EntourageABMenu will have no data with which to work.

You can configure a global hotkey to open a dynamic lookup window. Typing a contact’s name or company in the lookup field will search your data and present you with a menu (emails, phone numbers, URLs, notes, & addresses) for the contact you’ve selected. Note: the data included in the lookup feature will be limited to the data you have requested EntourageABMenu to gather. For instance, if you have set the preferences to limit contacts to a specific category, only contacts in that category will be available to the lookup feature. Similarly, if you have chosen to use contacts from an Exchange account, then only those contacts will be listed using the lookup feature.

If you have an Exchange account set up in Entourage that uses an Exchange server with Outlook Web Access (OWA) Global Address List (GAL) search enabled, you can use the EntourageABMenu lookup feature to search for contacts on the server’s GAL. To enable this feature, using the drop down menu from the magnifying glass search menu on the left side of the lookup field, choose “Outlook Web Access Lookup” and your search will go out to the Exchange server and return the matching contacts. This feature requires Entourage 2004 SP2 or later and it also requires that Entourage is open on your system. If you have more than one Exchange account defined in Entourage, the account you designate in the Exchange accounts drop down menu in the preferences window (even if you have not selected the option to use contacts from this account) will be the account used for the OWA lookup. Naturally, choosing “Personal Address Book Lookup” will limit the search to the contacts you have cached in EntourageABMenu. For all lookups, the search is case insensitive and for local lookups you can search for either contact name or company while OWA lookups are limited to the name only.

Actions

While it is helpful to simply see all of your contact data in the EntourageABMenu menus, the real power of the application comes when you select a contact from a menu and trigger the associated action. You can choose the actions associated with the different data types (main contact item, email, phone number, and postal address). For the most part, the actions should be fairly self-evident. Selecting “Copy to Clipboard” will, of course, copy that data to the clipboard. Choosing “Show in Large Type” will create a large semi-transparent window with the selected data. This window will remain visible until you click on it. For more information about the “Dial with AppleScript” action, please see below.

When selecting the main contact name, if the associated selection action is to create a new email, dial with the phone number AppleScript, or show on Google Maps, the default email address, phone number, or postal address (respectively) is used for the action. If the required default data is not available for the contact, selecting the main contact name will do nothing. Similarly, when selecting a group (category or company) with the selection action to create a new email will open a new message with each of the default email addresses (if available) for all group members in the address field specified in the preferences (To, Cc, or Bcc).

Utility Menu

For your convenience, you can use the included utilities menu to access some common Entourage functions. You can create new items (messages, contacts, notes, etc.), switch identities, run schedules, or toggle the Work Offline setting.

Preferences

You can use the preferences to choose the source of your data, how your data is displayed, the actions to trigger when selecting menu items, and generally configure the behavior of the application. To open the preferences window, simply select the preferences menu option from the main application menu.

If you choose the option to normalize company names then EntourageABMenu will attempt to clean company names so that contacts from the same company will be grouped together even if the company name for multiple contacts may vary slightly in your Entourage address book. For instance, if you do not enable this option and you have a company associated with a contact and it is entered as “company, inc.” and another contact where the company is entered as “Company, Inc.”, then in the companies submenu, there will be different submenus for these two variations on the company name. If you enable the normalize option, both contacts will be grouped in a single company submenu titled “Company, Inc.”. Using the normalization feature can be helpful but may have unintended consequences such as losing inner caps (e.g., “MyCompany” would become “Mycompany”) or other formatting features.

When using the “Dial With AppleScript” selection action with phone numbers, the script you enter in the “Phone Number AppleScript” will be executed using the data from the selected contact. You can enter any AppleScript you want and to access the contact name and number, you must use the data placeholders (%n for the contact name; %# for the contact number). Please be aware when entering these placeholders that the name and number are strings and will need to be quoted in your script to be properly executed. To understand how this works, EntourageABMenu contains several pre-configured scripts for sending the selected phone number to various external dialing applications (Dialectic, Macron Software’s ABDialer, & From Concentrate Software’s MacDialer).

Troubleshooting

If you encounter problems with EntourageABMenu, quit EntourageABMenu (if it is open) and then delete the preferences file and the cache folder (move them both to the trash). This will resolve most issues. The preferences file can be found in your preferences folder (~ is shorthand for your Home folder):

~/Library/Preferences/com.jen.eabm.plist

The cache folder is located in the EntourageABMenu Application Support folder (just delete the cache folder, not the whole EntourageABMenu Application Support folder):

~/Library/Application Support/EntourageABMenu/cache

Once deleted, relaunch EntourageABMenu.

Version History

• v1.5.8 - Released September 30, 2009
  • Improved support for Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
  • Minor code & interface updates.
• v1.5.7 - Released May 14, 2008
  • Improved support for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).
  • Improved support for Entourage 2008.
  • Minor code & interface updates.
  • Note: This update increases the minimum requirements to Mac OS X 10.4.9+.
• v1.5.6 - Released October 23, 2007
  • Fixed several minor bugs.
• v1.5.5 - Released June 29, 2007
  • Fixed a launch error that occurred in some situations when EntourageABMenu is launched and Entourage is not.
  • Fixed a Google map bug.
  • Many memory & code optimizations.
  • Several minor enhancements.
• v1.5.4 - Released January 29, 2007
  • Improved French localization thanks to Ronald Leroux.
  • Corrected an issue when using the “Speak” action.
  • Fixed an error opening new mail on some international systems.
  • Minor fixes and enhancements.
• v1.5.3 - Released January 11, 2007
  • Added option to disable the new mail check.
  • Fixed an error that prevented the application from finding contacts in Entourage on some systems.
  • Fixed an error related to retrieving new messages on some systems.
  • Fixed an error that prevented launch on some international systems.
• v1.5.2 - Released January 8, 2007
  • Added new “Insert Text” action for contact menu items. Selecting this will insert the selected contact data item as text into the frontmost application.
  • Added “New Mail” menu item that will list any new mail messages received in Entourage (it polls Entourage, if open, every 60 seconds).
  • Added Option-double-click to the found contacts table in the Lookup window to open the selected contact(s) in Entourage (if you want to open multiple contacts, try holding down Shift and Option when double-clicking on found contacts).
  • Improved Lookup function so that it searches all contact fields, not just name and company.
  • Improved handling of extra long menu item titles (they will now word wrap at a maximum line length of 60 characters).
  • Improved registration process.
  • Fixed “Show on Map” action bug that prevented using mapping services other than Google.
  • Minor interface and code enhancements.
• v1.5.1 - Released October 20, 2006
  • Added several international Google Maps options.
  • Added feature to select multiple names in the found contacts section. When selecting multiple contacts and then using the action menu, the default email addresses (if available) for the selected contacts will be used to send an email to all group members in the address field specified in the preferences (To, Cc, or Bcc).
• v1.5 - Released June 8, 2006
  • Added geographical menus for sorting contacts by city, state/province, and country.
  • Added user-defined sorting to lookup results.
  • Added multiple word searching to personal lookup (e.g., you can now search on name and company at once).
  • Added double-click action to display data menu for found contact in lookup.
  • Improved remote lookup performance.
  • Improved compatibility with accounts that have a large number of contacts.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented launch or menu rebuild if you deleted a contact in Entourage currently in the Recently Used menu.
  • Minor interface enhancements.
  • Note: on the first launch of v1.5, even if you have set EntourageABMenu to use a data cache, your data will be reloaded from Entourage. This is necessary due to an update to the internal cache format. Subsequent launches of v1.5 will respect your option to use the data cache.
• v1.4 - Released April 26, 2006
  • Added a recently used contacts submenu.
  • Added support for contact URLs and notes.
  • Added option to determine the order of contact submenus (All, Alphabetical, etc.).
  • Added option to determine inclusion and order of contact data items (phone, email, etc.).
  • Added options for map source (no longer limited to just Google Maps).
  • Added option to determine field for group emails.
  • Added utilities menu for making new items, switching identities, running schedules, and toggling work offline status.
  • Added submenu to the groups submenu for contacts that are not members of any group.
  • Added complete keyboard control to lookup window. Tab to switch between the search field and the found contact table, press enter or return to display the contact data menu, arrow up or down and press return to select a contact data item.
  • Using the “Copy to Clipboard” selection action with the main menu item will copy all contact data to the clipboard.
  • Improved lookup speed when local database contains a large number of contacts.
  • Fixed bug that prevented copied data from pasting properly in some applications.
  • Fixed a launch error that occurred on some non-US English systems.
  • Fixed the menu display when no contacts are found.
  • Many interface enhancements.
  • Note: on the first launch of v1.4, even if you have set EntourageABMenu to use a data cache, your data will be reloaded from Entourage. This is necessary due to an update to the internal cache format. Subsequent launches of v1.4 will respect your option to use the data cache.
• v1.3 - Released April 6, 2006
  • Added an option to make the contact data cache persistent which makes subsequent launches significantly faster. This also enables modifications to the display options to be enacted without requiring a slow data reload from Entourage. In addition, when the cache is enabled, the automatic data reload option is disabled and clicking on the Exchange accounts or category popup menus will not initiate a live update from Entourage. If you enable the cache and you need to update your contact information in EntourageABMenu because you have modified your contacts in Entourage, selecting “Reload Data Now” from the main menu or the preference window will force the cache to be rebuilt.
  • Added an option to automatically reload the contact data at a specific time each day. Using this feature, you could reload the data at a time when the machine is not in use (e.g., 3:00 AM) which allows your contact data in EntourageABMenu to be synchronized with Entourage without bogging down the system when it needs to be responsive.
  • Added options to the main contact name selection action to create a new email, dial with the phone number AppleScript, or show on Google Maps. If one of these items is selected the default email address, phone number, or postal address (respectively) is used for the action. If the required default data is not available for the contact, selecting the main contact name will do nothing.
  • Added selection action for groups (contacts grouped by a single category or company) to create new email with each of the default email addresses (if available) for all group members in the BCC field.
  • Modified the preferences so changing any of the display options and rebuilding the menus will not require the contact data to be reloaded from Entourage.
  • Improved support of contact names with diacritical characters (accent marks).
  • Fixed an error that caused the default postal address to not be listed first in some instances.
  • Fixed an error when creating a new email to a contact with an ampersand in the name.
  • Significant speed and memory optimizations.
  • Several interface modifications.
  • Added French translation by Hervé Bismuth.
• v1.2 - Released March 30, 2006
  • Added option to disable any of the contact submenus.
  • Added support for contacts stored in Exchange-based address books.
  • Added Outlook Web Access Global Address List lookups (requires an Exchange account with Outlook Web Access Global Address List search capabilities and Entourage 2004 SP2+).
  • Added option to normalize company names (this will attempt to clean and consolidate company names so that contacts will be grouped together if their company is the same except for minor variations such as character case).
  • Added option to use icons that more closely resemble the Entourage interface.
  • Added option to quit Entourage after loading data (note: clicking on the category names or Exchange account names popups causes EntourageABMenu to reload these popup menus with current data from Entourage and, if Entourage is not open, EntourageABMenu will launch Entourage).
  • Added option to include title and suffix in contact names (where available).
  • Other minor interface tweaks.
• v1.1.2 - Released March 24, 2006
  • Improved memory management.
  • Minor interface tweaks.
• v1.1.1 - Released March 23, 2006
  • Fixed a bug that prevented launch on some Mac OS X 10.3.9 systems.
  • Minor code optimizations.
• v1.1 - Released March 23, 2006
  • Significantly improved the speed of the content load from Microsoft Entourage.
  • Added dial scripts for Skype and Gizmo.
  • Added the option to disable the Command modifier for the global lookup hotkey.
  • Fixed the modifier key representations for the global lookup hotkey in the menu.
• v1.0 - Released March 22, 2006
  • Initial public release.

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