Q&A: moving from Outlook to Entourage

I got the following question via email:

How do I copy my Outlook 2003 contacts, calendar, email and tasks from my old PC to my new Macbook?

At this time, we don't provide a direct import from Windows Outlook PST to Entourage 2008.

There are some workarounds for it. I've never tried them myself because I've never used Outlook, so I can't provide any specific feedback here. These are listed in no particular order.

If you use an Exchange server, you probably don't need to do anything at all. Put everything on Exchange, and voila: Entourage will download your mail and contacts. If you're using the Entourage for Exchange Web Services beta against Exchange 2007 or later, then you also get your notes and tasks,

Outlook2Mac is a third-party application that claims to transfer PST files. I've heard that this process is extremely lengthy if you have a very large PST.

If you have access to an older PowerPC-based Mac, you can try the instructions from the Entourage MVPs for importing from Windows Outlook. It requires you to go through Outlook for Mac, which is a very old Classic application.

I also understand that it's possible to use Mozilla Thunderbird on your
Windows computer. I found some instructions for this on an Australian website. However, this only works for your mail; I'm not sure how you would use Thunderbird to get your contacts and tasks.