A few weeks ago, I updated a large office to Office 2011. They had been using Office 2004 but found it had issues after their Exchange server was upgraded to 2008. They initially purchased one license for Office 2011 and used it on a test machine. They were pleased with the performance of Outlook with their upgraded Exchange server, so they decided to go ahead and upgrade the whole office.
As with previous versions of Office, 2011 has the ability to import settings and content from the previous version. After installing the Office suite, I was able to open Outlook and tell it to import information from the Entourage 2004 database. All appeared to work well; all contacts appeared, emails flowed in and all email folders appeared to have imported. However, at the tail end of the upgrades it was revealed that all of the “On My Mac” folders—while visible—were empty. This was consistent for all users.
My first step to resolve this issue was to try a fresh reimport; this time, I asked Outlook to only import the mail from Entourage 2004. Once again, all of the folders populated but they were empty. Next, I opened Entourage (which I luckily had not erased yet) and exported just the messages by going to File > Export, exporting “Items to an Entourage archive” and only checking off “Mail.” Then, in Outlook, I first deleted the empty folders, and then imported mail by going to File > Import and importing from the archive I had.
Since this company uses an Exchange server, reimporting all of the messages from Entourage did not create duplicates. It did, however, correctly import the messages within the “On My Mac” folders, which were the only messages not kept on the Exchange server. This was easy to repeat on everyone’s machine, but I sure was glad I had waited to deleted Office 2004 before giving each user a chance to check out 2011.
I’ve done a few subsequent installs of Office 2011 and have found that this importing glitch does not occur all the time. While it happened 100% of the time in this office of Exchange users, I did a 2004 to 2011 upgrade for a home user who had an IMAP account and his “On My Mac” folders and emails all appeared just fine. However, his contacts did not transfer properly and I did need to export those manually from Entourage 2004 and import them into Outlook. The moral of the story is for those of you out there upgrading to Office 2011, do yourself a favor and skim through your folders, contacts and calendars before deleting the previous version of Office. It can save you time and frustration!