Occasionally, I receive requests for help with modifying an AppleScript I wrote for Macintosh administrators to assist their Entourage users to connect with Exchange. See [“How to use AppleScript to connect Entourage to Exchange Server 2000 sp2, 2003 or 2007″](http://www.entourage.mvps.org/exchange/setup_script.html).
Today I received one such request for an administrator, Mike, who had a need to also set his users’ encoding preferences for attachments to *Windows (MIME/base64)* because his Exchange Server 2007 server is stripping the contents of outgoing message attachments. Mike said he’d *”spent 4 hours googling and reviewing every script at macscripters”.*
My first line in response to him was, *”I’ll make it easy on you. It’s not possible to script any of Entourage’s preferences. :-(“*
But then I had an *Aha!* moment.
The good news for me is that I can not only help Mike solve his problem but I’ll also solve one of my own long-standing issues with the script, which is that it requires user a user to run it prior to using Entourage for the first time. That takes user training. Ideally, the script would run at first launch of Entourage.
Furthermore, I can now add a slew of pre-configured benefits that weren’t possible such as preference settings, rules, schedules and more.
In a few days I hope to post instructions for setting up a pre-configured Entourage identity that is set to work offline. This identity and my script will be pre-populated into the **User Templates** folder. At first launch a pre-populated script will run and the rest of the setup works just like the old script. At the end I will disable the schedule that launched the script and set Entourage to work online.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. Probably, someone else already has.
Remember the Human 