Looking for a Shared Calendar and Contacts solution

[imnickb]

I run a bar with my family and we're all constantly making calls and scheduling appointments and things with people. I'm looking for some sort of cloud based solution where we can keep contacts, calendar events, and notes and then everybody can access them from their phones and home computers. Right now we use Dropbox, but I'd like something more integrated in the phone. For example, when I pull up a spreadsheet of phone numbers in Dropbox, I can't click on a phone number to dial it. Also, if I pull up a calendar in Dropbox, I can't edit the file on my phone, only view it. Google drive is OK, except that to edit documents I have to convert everything to the Google doc format and we can no longer use Office to edit our files. A shared google calendar is OK since it seems to integrate with the phones better than a spreadsheet in Dropbox, but I'd love to be able to have something like "DJ Killa-Face 10PM-2AM" on the calendar and then be able to click his name and have it pull up his contact information to call him.

Does anything like this exist or am I dreaming?

Thanks!

 

[BrianBaughn]

What you guys need is CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software but I don't have specific recommendations on something that will do what you want. It's evolving for iOS and I haven't been keeping up lately.

Anyway, now you know what to look for.

 

[imnickb]

Thanks, I didn't even know that was a thing so you're right, I didn't know what I was looking for. It looks like Zoho might be good or maybe I can use the Quickbooks app. Thanks!

 

[Nolander07]

You can use iCloud for all or most of that. Have the others put your iCloud acct on calendars, notes, etc. then have them set your iCloud calendar, etc. as their default calendar when scheduling events. When something is entered, it will be on all phones. You can do that with contacts as well, I believe. If this interests you I can expand the explanation. I do this on a smaller scale with my family and it works great.

 

[imnickb]

Sure, explain how your family is doing this. It's really just me and my mom and dad so only 3 of us. All of the solutions I've looked at so far have been really involved and cost an amount of money per person, per month. Since google will let you share a calendar but not contacts, I had an idea to make one generic email address for the bar and then have everyone add that to their phones contact list in addition to their contact list. Since you can't share a contact group in gmail, sharing an entire contact list on a dedicated email address seemed to be the next best solution. They both have iPhones and I'm on android right now and I have a mac and they have PCs. I was hoping to find something that would work for all devices and platforms. I'm switching to iPhone next month so hopefully that should make some things easier.

 

[Stuke00]

Why not just create a generic gmail account that everyone logs into on their phones? It syncs with the Notes app, Calendar and Contacts.

 

[Nolander07]

Go to settings>mail, contacts, calendars>accounts. Add account, for example your icloud account to the other phones. You will have to enter your password. After that is verified, click on your icloud account on your parents phone and turn on whatever you want to share- calendar, contacts, reminders, etc.
after this, go back to mail, contacts, calendars and scroll down to calendars. Go into default calendar at the bottom and check off the one that corresponds to your icloud. Do this on everyone's phone except yours. On yours simply click icloud.
I think that's about it. Just make sure you have the same calendar displayed on each phone. I just have all calendars displayed so I don't miss anything. This method has worked great for us for the last 1 1/2 years or so.

 

[BrianBaughn]

The OP can only achieve part of what he requested using shared contacts, reminders and calendars but since he added that this is a family situation that's probably the way to go.

Google calendars can be shared between Google users with full access. Contacts...not so much. You'd have to do as someone suggested and create one shared gmail account just for contacts. Reminders (tasks) with Google really requires a separate app on the iPhone.

Outlook.com might be the way to go. You'll get calendars, contacts and reminders that work with the three native iPhone apps.

BTW, you CAN use Google Drive with MS Offices documents...just don't convert them when uploading. My Google Drive app works like Dropbox in that respect. Also, the Insync app for Mac or Windows (insynchq.com) allows you to see your own Google Drive as well as shared items or folders from other Google users...a good way to go if everyone wants their own account.

A hodgepodge of different services is the way I'm set up.

 

[imnickb]

After trying a million different ways, I too went with the hodgepodge.

I created a shared gmail account that we just use for contacts and I set it up using CardDAV as Google suggested. I created a Google calendar in the same account and everyone can just subscribe to that or just add the whole email and calendar log in info to their phone. We're still using Dropbox for shared files. I wish I could edit the docs on mobile devices and I know GoogleDrive allows that, but I don't want to switch everything to their file format just to get write access on mobile. I think they're interface is a little slicker too. So that's it! A shared Google contact list via a shared email account, a shared Google calendar, and shared docs in Dropbox. It's not the prettiest thing, but for three people it seems to be working pretty well.

Thanks for all of the help!

I tried iCloud for a bit but I think I prefer to use this for my personal stuff and keep the business stuff out of it.