Yup. anther one of these questions, although it's actually not really related (for the most part).
The office I just started working at has me setup with Outlook pulling from a POP3 mail server. Outlook is fine, but there's no Exchange support set up so as it is now, nothing I do syncs across my office pc and my phone (or my laptop, for that matter). Organize emails into folders in my office, I still have a shit inbox everywhere else, not to mention the problem with sent messages and contacts not syncing. Now, I don't think I'm going to convince anyone to change anything across the board at this point, but this totally doesn't work for me - I manage and/or coordinate roughly twenty projects in various stages and need to be pretty fucking organized in order to do so. Plus, pulling email from a POP3 server to multiple devices is pretty inefficient because each has to be set to leave copies on the server or else it just won't work. I have no idea how much storage space is there, but I have very big documents coming in.
I have no idea how to really manage this and all I can really come up with at this point is to set up a gmail account as a front end to sync everything. Gmail pulls from the POP3, phone syncs with Gmail, and I could even set up Outlook to pull from gmail instead of the POP3 directly (although I probably won't do that. The only benefit would be to allow gmail to delete messages off the server when it pulled them. I'll probably just leave Outlook at the office pulling off of the POP 3, act as a backup, and I'll manually delete messages off of the server through it . Which is what I'll probably do. The added benefit of having Outlook act as a backup is that someone can still pull my email if I'm not there, with the only downside being that I'll have to manually delete old messages off of the server through it (or set the timer to delete messages over a week or so, as they'll already be imported into Gmail at that time). I can also probably better utilize my android this way, with all my calendar events being synced better and my contacts broken up between the work account and my personal one.
I'm just wondering if anyone else has any better ideas/similar experiences.
Oh, and I think I figured out part of Google's motivation in getting rid of the free version of Google Apps. App Sync, which is the program I utilized previously to completely sync between Outlook and Gmail - Contacts, calendar, folders, everything - is now restricted only to Google Apps for Business accounts. So, it seems that they're really setting themselves up as a lower cost , cloud-based (and easier to manage) alternative to a traditional Exchange server.
