I believe that most computer users have multiple e-mail addresses and spend a lot of time going to various sites to check their mail. This is certainly true for myself. Although I was able to aggregate most using Microsoft Outlook, there still seemed to be something missing or that wasn’t quite right.

While listening to the Windows Weekly Podcast with Paul Thurrott and Leo Laporte. Paul did a short segment about simplifying things by aggregating not only your e-mail, but calendar, to-do lists and similar activities in the “cloud”. After hearing what Paul had to say, I knew what was missing. Aggregating everything in Outlook worked great as long as I was at home where the application was available to me.

I took the plunge and aggregated all of my e-mail accounts using Hotmail, as well as my personal and work calendars and my personal “to-do” list. I’ve got to be honest….it felt a little weird. I was way outside of my “comfort zone”. It didn’t take me long to realize that I should have done this years ago. Now, regardless of where I am, as long as I have access to a computer and can get on-line, I have one single place I can go to check my mail and calendar….it really works great. To aggregate my various e-mail accounts, I didn’t add them to Hotmail, but rather went to each of my accounts and set it up to forward my e-mail to my Hotmail account. On some of my accounts, I had the option of forwarding and leaving a copy on the server. That’s a personal choice, but where I did have this option, I did not select it. The only other minor issue I’ve encountered is trying to get my work calendar imported. I wasn’t able to publish my work calendar so that I could subscribe to it, but I was able to e-mail it which creates an “ics” file. I then save the file to my desktop and then go to the Windows Live Calendar and upload it. This seems to be working great. As I said earlier, when I first set this up, I was way outside my comfort zone but now I’m glad I “took the plunge”. Come on in…the water’s fine!