Migrate Entourage 2008 from an iMac & Convert to Outlook 2016 for Mac

Convert Entourage to Outlook 2016 for MacMigration from Entourage to Outlook Mac become necessary as Outlook 2016 for Mac offers lots of features to its users. There are many other reasons for migration some of them are compatibility issue, errors in old version of entourage and more.

One of my friends has an old iMac with Entourage 2008 for many years. His aging Mac machine is still in perfect condition, but Entourage 2008 is no longer supported on El Capitan. So he buys a new iMac that packed with Microsoft Office 2016 Business for Mac. It also contains Outlook 2016 for Mac, and here comes the problem. As in order to access all of its previous entourage data over the new Mac machine he need to Migrate Entourage 2008 from his old iMac to new iMac. He called a professional to do this task which costs him approx $99.

If you are suffering from the above discussed scenario and want to convert old Entourage to Outlook 2016 for Mac without paying a single penny then don’t worry as with the help of below given steps the entourage migration task will become as easy as walking in the park.

Overview:

  1. Backup Entourage 2008 data with the help of Time Machine or perform a manual backup.
  2. After it, create a new “abc” user account on your old iMac, and try to migrate current Entourage data to it. This is because to
  3. Now, import the “abc” Entourage data into Outlook 2011 for Mac on old iMac.
  4. At last, try to migrate the imported Outlook 2011 for Mac data onto the new iMac and import it into Outlook 2016 for Mac.

 

Complete Solution

If you want to migrate your old entourage 2008 to Outlook 2016 for Mac directly then you only achieve this task by breaking the process into two part.

First migrate into Outlook 2011 for Mac and then Outlook 2011 for Mac can be migrated to the Outlook 2016 for Mac.

If you are new with this work around then don’t worry and simply follow the below given steps. All the given steps are not necessary for migration of entourage but all of them will guide you to migrate entourage 2008 to Outlook 2016 for Mac without loss of a single bit:

Note: Before doing any operation over your important entourage data it is always suggested to create a backup first.

In this case it is also recommended to create a manual backup of the 2008 identity, the user identity is present in the document folder with the “Microsoft User Data” or any similar name.

If you don’t know about “How to Backup and Restore Entourage Identity” then you should read the complete guide at Step by Step Guide to Backup and Restore Entourage Identity.

After creating backup of your entourage Identity, archive your entourage 2008. Find a file that contains “.rge” extension. Store both i.e. backup of Entourage Identity and archive file on an external storage device.

Now you will have three copies of the 2008 data:

First:  The original Entourage identity stored on the hard drive.
Second: The copy of the identity stored on the external drive.
Third: The “.rge” archive also stored on external drive.

Make sure that Microsoft 2011 is updated or no any update is pending, to do this run MS Word 2011 or MS Excel or MS PowerPoint and check for updates.  But don’t run MS Outlook for verifying any update.

If any update is pending then download the update else run Outlook, see if it will import the identity “as is”. This process is time taking depending on the size of identity.

If Outlook 2011 is unable to import the 2008 identity, then now you need to use the two files you made earlier.  Any one of them will defiantly work.

If not any of them help you to import the identity then, you go back to 2008 and rebuild the database.  After rebuilding the entourage database, try to get Outlook to open that new entourage identity. If you don’t know that how to rebuild entourage identity then you can take help from my previous blog: How to Repair and Rebuild your identity database in Entourage 2008 for Mac?

After rebuilding the identity, copy them to the external storage drive.  You can also run the export (archive) feature and create a “.olm” file.  As Microsoft changed the file type with MS 2011, store the file to the external drive.

That’s all, use your new machine and Outlook 2016 on Mac.