I use Microsoft Outlook 2007 at work for our work email. It’s an exchange account so I had to use it over other mail clients. I’ve grown to like it over the past year, but I never used it for anything other than email. I don’t keep a calendar at my work, nor do I save contacts in the address book, no I never used the program to its full potential.

Last week my Gmail account was hacked (still not sure exactly what happened) so I wanted to create a new email address to start using to replace Gmail. I will probably never stop using my Gmail account, but I will use the new email address I created for my more pertinent information. I decided to sign up for a Mobile Me account. I never would have even considered paying for an email account in the past, but since I got my iPhone I’ve been looking for an easy way to keep my calendars, email, and contacts all in one place. I could sync the calendar on the iPhone with Google Calendar, but only if I synced it with my MacBook first. I wanted something that would sync my calendars over the air. Mobile Me became that answer. I still have to open up my MacBook for it to sync with Google, but I don’t have to sync my iPhone to it anymore. Now my iPhone syncs with my PC only.

I decided to setup the Mobile Me account on my PC in Outlook and have it sync my contacts and calendars as well. While the Mobile Me website is a nice looking website, I don’t want to have to log in to webmail whenever I want to check email. In the past, using Gmail, I didn’t mind because Gmail login was integrated with all my other Google services and I have a Gmail notifier installed in Firefox. Outlook 2007 is much better than I would have ever thought. After all, it is a Microsoft product and I am beginning to loathe everything about Microsoft. They actually did do something right for once though. Outlook 2007 is better than 2003 by leaps and bounds, and Mobile Me works quite well with it. There were a few weird inconsistencies with deleted items appearing with just a line struck through it, but I believe I fixed that issue and everything should be working great now.