I've been testing Google Apps Standard Edition for email management of our own email and it seems to work great.
One thing I like a lot about Google Apps Email is the significantly reduced spam that you receive. Google Apps Email filters do a great job of eliminating the majority of the spam without the false positives that some other email filters have. It's like using Gmail, but you can use your own domain. For example instead of having yourname@gmail.com, you can have yourname@yourdomain.com, but be able to login using a similar interface as gmail as well as sending/receiving email through your regular desktop software such as MS Outlook. Also, the service is quite fast, easy to use and reliable. The best part is that the service is free.
I highly recommend that you give this service a try. It's not very difficult to switch over. I am able to handle the bulk of the setup for you if you are a client of ours. For your part a few minor changes would be needed for your Outlook settings and then you should be good to go.
Also, I suggest giving the Google Calendar a try for managing your schedule... again, this is included with Google Apps. I think this is a very usefull tool for keeping track of events. You can create multiple calendars for different types of events and activate/deactivate the calendars from your view. Also, you can adjust the settings to share specific calendars with family, coworkers or make them public. You can make a public calendar of business related events for clients/customers and then embed the calendar directly on your website.
If your website is hosted with us and you are interested in giving Google Apps a try,
contact me and we can convert your email over to Google Apps right away. Again, it's fairly easy and would require very little effort on your part.
