I didn't mean move away from Office, nor Outlook.
Outlook defaults to using Word as the email editor when Outlook itself is a perfectly fine email editor. Same task -- less bloat. Goto Tools / Options / Mail Format and uncheck the "Use Microsoft Office Word to edit email messages".
Microsoft Word is an absolutely horrible HTML editor. Being a tech guy, I just plain cant stand using Word as my email editor.
With regards to sync -- Not sure. We use Exchange so everything is auto-magically synced.
Try here, this is a pretty good site for all things outlook/exchange...
http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/sync.asp