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.

Removing those products left us with mostly cloud-based services. The responses to our article suggest that the majority of you are comfortable with these hosted solutions. Our job, then, was to sift through all of the competing services to find the tool (or tools) that best met the needs of our hypothetical use cases.

Google: Gets by with a little help from its friends

Google isn't quite the all-in-one solution we're looking for, but as several of you mentioned it's quite good at the things it does support. Google Calendars are easy to share between users, and Google Drive and Google Docs make sharing of files and documents relatively easy. Google Sites and Google Docs also serve as passable collaborative editing and sharing tools, filling the gap that a Wiki server otherwise might.

Google's products also scale well—our hypothetical married couple could easily share calendars and Google Drive contents between personal Gmail accounts, our small traveling sales team could do the same with a free ten-user Google Apps account, and our small office could upgrade to a full Google Apps account and get perks like Active Directory integration in the process. Users can create extra calendars for group activity (instructions for syncing multiple calendars to mobile devices can be found here, for the person who asked), and Google Apps users can create non-human service accounts for the same purpose.

There are a couple of things that Google can't quite manage, however (and these caveats also go for competing products like Office 365): the first is automated syncing of contacts between users. Google Apps users can automatically search their directory for users, but there isn't a way to add addresses from outside your domain for all users at once. The second is sync and sharing support for Tasks lists—native mobile sync isn't available even if you're using the Exchange-powered Google Sync, which can also be an issue if you use clients like Outlook or iCal on your desktop. And while Google noted back in January of 2011 that task sharing was one of the most requested features for its service, that capability still hasn't been added to the platform. Some of you noted that you were keeping track of tasks using Google Docs. But for smartphone users especially, we feel it's important that we identify some more automated and touch-friendly solutions.

Task sharing

Task syncing and sharing is going to require a third-party to do the heavy lifting, and we were given no shortage of suggestions. One is Remember the Milk (suggested by forum users Mastershogo and david.rendall), a standalone service that not only features stand-alone iOS, Android, and Blackberry apps, but also integrates with Gmail, Google Calendar, Twitter, and Outlook. It will also integrate with iOS's native Reminders app via CalDAV. Tasks can be sent and received from other Remember the Milk accounts in much the same way emails are, both to individuals added to contacts lists and to groups of contacts. Sharing a task will keep it in both owners' to-do lists, while sending a task will simply put it into the recipient's Inbox.

I prefer Remember the Milk for its integration into existing services, but if you're more into standalone apps then Wunderlist (the choice of forum users Step21, Dor Green, and kyleCS) is also a solid choice—apps are available not just for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone, but Windows, OS X, and Linux. Tasks can be shared with Wunderlist users, and read-only lists of tasks can also be printed and emailed to users. While both Remember the Milk and Wunderlist are excellent services for tasks, the fact that each requires a separate user account to share with other users means they're best suited to smaller groups like our hypothetical family or our small traveling sales team. A larger office could use the services, in theory, but their inability to integrate with existing accounts and directories could make user management a pain on a large scale.

Asana, a product which more of you (including forum goers MrMarket and Cr.) recommended, is built with larger teams in mind, and will allow you to sign in with a Google or Google Apps ID if you have one. Asana is part tasks list, part ticket tracking system—you can create and share tasks and projects (lists composed of many tasks), and you can either assign tasks to co-workers, or add them as "followers"—allowing many people to stay abreast of how a task is progressing without creating confusion about who needs to take the next action. Asana provides mobile support via an iOS app and an HTML5 web client that will render in most modern desktop and mobile web browsers. Asana wins on affordability—the service is free for teams of up to 30 people. If you need to add more users, or if you’d like to take advantage of Asana’s premium workspaces, you’ll have to upgrade to one of the paid plans.

Listing image by Tony Case