I installed Microsoft Outlook 2013 the other day, along with the rest of Office 2013. I’m only about two years late, right?  Office 2013 offers little over Office 2010, but there is a somewhat cleaner design (OSX 10.7 anyone?) and really nice animations when windows open and close. Forgive me for saying this, but the interface is more Mac-like, even though it came out two years before the recent updates to OSX and IOS 7.

I originally had OutLook eMail synced to my Google Apps email. Then I wanted to also use the Outlook calendar and have changes made there reflected in my Google Apps calendar which is the group calendar that we use in the office. A quick search found the Google Outlook synchronizer, an application that sits outside of Outlook and runs interference between Outlook and Google apps.

The nice thing about this is that that it doesn’t require you to put in all kinds of IMAP information into your Outlook profile…you simply give it your Google Apps eMail address and off it goes and downloads everything from Google Apps, creates a new profile within OutLook, and then uploads everything into mailboxes in Outlook (see screenshot). If it works, it will great. I includes your contact lists, shared calendars, co-workers calendars, notes, and tasks.

The poor mans’s Exchange Server? 

If you use Google Apps in the office, and have Windows computers, you could have this running on each machine, and essentially use Google Apps as a back-end Exchange Server.