Sharing made simple: Dealing with tough sync scenarios
Recently, we put out a call asking all of you to help us with a problem: finding a way to sync and share calendars, task lists, and other data between different users across different platforms, simply and cheaply. We provided three hypothetical scenarios we were seeking to solve:
- A married couple keeping track of kids' soccer practices, music lessons, and maintaining a family address book.
- A four-person traveling sales team working on the road, mostly from smartphones and tablets.
- A small office of a few dozen people who would like inter-office communication and project management to go smoothly.
You responded, and the answers you gave were both numerous and varied. We got suggestions for everything from command-line tools to home servers to dead-simple cloud products, and there were very few repeat answers among the 80 or so comments we received in the first 48 hours. We've evaluated your suggestions, and it’s time to share the best of what the Ars hive-mind came up with.
Because we were looking for simple and painless solutions, any suggestion requiring command line or scripting knowledge were disqualified (as interesting as some of your implementations sounded, we felt that was too much to throw at an average user). Complexity and cost also disqualified any answer that hinged on setting up your own server. And lastly, because of our cross-platform stipulations, we threw out solutions that only worked (or only worked best) with products from a specific company—though it sounds like many of you in the Apple and Microsoft camps are having success with iCloud and Windows Live Mesh, respectively.
from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/sharing-made-simple-dea...