Used to be I always worked in a corporate environment where someone else was responsible for providing email with Microsoft Exchange and everyone used Microsoft Outlook. Email was not my problem, life was good.
Now I have my own business and I manage email for clients with limited resources. Life, or at least email, is a lot messier.
Common options these days are
- Run your own Microsoft Exchange on Windows Server.
- Use a hosted Exchange solution, eg. from Rackspace.
- Use Google Apps.
My experience with Google Apps Sync has not been as seamless as I had hoped for: calendars didn’t seem to sync quite right, and including iPhones with ActiveSync just made it worse. Then there was all the confusion around Apps Sync wanting to remove emails from in-boxes over 2-4 GB – maybe justifiable but it just didn’t work in the same way as Exchange, and sometimes trying to introduce change in an organization is simply not worth it. My client is now happy with hosted exchange from Rackspace: not as cheap as Google Apps, but cheaper for a mid-sized organization than administering email in-house.