Hi -
I am looking to get some input on a project I’m working on for my girlfriend around setting up her email, shared drive, calendar, and contacts across my desktop PC, her laptop, and her phone. I’ve been poking around different articles on the Net for answers and advice and have failed to find something comprehensive. If someone could give me some feedback on the below, it would be appreciated!
Please forgive the forthcoming wall of text!
She is a realtor and works from home, her office, and on the road.
Needs a solution where her shared drive, email, calendar, and contacts are the same across all devices. So, if she deletes an email from her phone in Starbucks, it needs to reflect when she gets back to her laptop. If she wants to work from my desktop for the bigger screen, she needs to work to reflect on her phone when she leaves to show a house.
There is an added problem in that she has a gmail address and a hosted domain with a different last name, so the contacts from her gmail address, contacts from her phone, and contacts in her Outlook 2016 need to be merged into one account. Preferably gmail so that when she gets a new phone, her accounts can download to new phone.
Phone is Android. PCs are Windows 10. Uses Word and Excel 2016 for work. Part of this project is setting up a new phone from Verizon (which we have but haven’t set up).
She used to have everything on an exchange server and got rid of it a couple of years ago. Not sure we’d want to go back to that. Not sure it’s needed.
She has found email addresses for both gmail.com and outlook.com that she likes.
I would consider myself an amatuer tinkerer when it comes to computer hardware and software, so the solution needs to be somewhat mainstream (so preferably no weird apps that I have to think about continually messing with).
Personally, I think the Outlook Email App for Android is pretty great and would suit her well. I use it and like it. I use Outlook.com for my webmail and like it better than gmail.
1 - I am not sure if she should set up a new email under gmail.com or outlook.com. If we go with Outlook.com, seems like there is an issue that would occur if she added a contact while in the Outlook Web Mail app, it would have to be added again to Gmail (so it shows up as a contact in her phone for phone calls). So, the advantage to a new gmail.com address is that she would work in the Gmail web application, contacts would synch across phone and webmail, and the Outlook Email App would recognize the contact so there’s no need to add it there so she’d work from that while working on the phone.
2 - Not sure about Shared Drive. I like OneDrive because it shows up as another file in Windows 10, Outlook WebMail, and Outlook Email App so it makes it easy to save to when working on the laptop or desktop. However, if we go with Gmail address, then she’ll be working in gmail while on the laptop/desktop which doesn’t have access to OneDrive. However, as I type this out, maybe it doesn’t matter as if she needed to save something to the cloud, she’d just save it OneDrive on the file explorer.
So, maybe the simplest solution:
New gmail address. Import contacts from old gmail and Outlook 2016
From Laptop or Desktop: Use Gmail for Email and Calendar
From Phone: Use Outlook Android App
For Shared Drive: Use OneDrive
Personally, I hate working in Gmail and think she would prefer the Outlook Calendar and WebMail. If it weren’t for the contacts, this would be a no brainer as I would just go with outlook.com, but I want her phone to be updated as well and want to cut down on as much of the manual work as possible.
Appreciate any input - honestly up until this morning I hadn’t even considered a new outlook.com email address, but given that outlook webmail, outlook android app, and onedrive seem to be the solutions I’m leaning towards, that seemed like a good solution with the exception of what I brought up above.
Thoughts? Apologies again for the wall of text!
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