Wanted: Contacts & calendars synced & edit-able by both of us

[stevemerrill]

Help with resolving this is appreciated.

My wife and I just got an iPhone 4 for each of us. Trying to figure out best way so contacts and calendars are synced and edit-able by both of us ... on our iMac, the phones AND at me.com.

Currently I have a single MobileMe (MM) account, an email-only MM for my wife, and she's using a separate user acct on the iMac. On her iMac acct I entered my MM credentials to sync contacts and calendar. I connected the iPhone on her user acct. iMac accts and iPhones sync perfectly.

Only problem is her me.com login does not sync with our contacts, and the calendar is not available (probably the least important piece). Maybe her me.com access with contacts/calendar is less critical since she'll have the iPhone???

From what I've read, the contacts won't sync across users/people, regardless of having (a) multiple MM single accts, or (b) a family MM. I'm open to sharing a single iMac user acct; upgrading to family MM; using the MM five users creatively; and other ideas.

The most difficult task will be getting her off Hotmail -- not IMAP so it's not friendly with email client or iPhone, but at least I already merged her Hotmail contacts into Address Book.

Thanks!

 

[d21mike]

With MobileMe each Account is separate. It does not matter if you have 2 individual or 2 on a family plan. The Family comes out cheaper but you have less storage. But it does not matter in regards to sharing because they are separate.

Contacts: The only way to share is to use the SAME MobileMe Account ID. She would not be able to use her MobileMe Account ID to access YOUR MobileMe Account. That would be the same as me using my MobileMe Account to access your Account. Totally separate and unique.

Calendar: Same as Contacts for normal access. However, with the Calendar Beta you can Share a Calendar Between the two Accounts. I.E. You can create a Calendar Called Mine and another Called Ours. You could then Share the Ours Calendar with your Wife and both of you can Edit the Ours Account. But you could keep the Mine Calendar separate for your personal stuff (if you want).

 

[d21mike]

FYI... Hotmail is going to support Exchange Style Active Sync for your iPhone. She would then use the mail.live.com on her computer and access Hotmail via Exchange Setup on her iPhone. This will be very similar to MobileMe if she really just prefers Hotmail.

I understand that this support should be available within weeks.

Also, if you want to share the Ours Calendar with her Live Account you would have to make it Public (use Private for MM to MM) and she would not be able to change it. However, I have tried to test this and it does not work yet. Not sure if it is a problem with Live.com or MobileMe. Waiting for MobileMe to get out of Beta Status and hope it works then. I am trying to share calendars between Live, Google and MobileMe. If you were using Google Calendar it can Subscribe to the MobileMe Public Calendar Share.

 

[d21mike]

You said you hooked her iPhone to her user account. Are you talking about the Mac? Anyway, I have all my iPhone's using the same iTunes Account so I can share Apps (pay once), Music (pay once), Movies (pay once) and pictures.

 

[steviem]

This is why I want an exchange server or for apple to have MobileMe built into osx server. I really want to look after my own data rather than trust apple, google, ms, aol or whoever else.

 

[d21mike]

This is why I want an exchange server or for apple to have MobileMe built into osx server. I really want to look after my own data rather than trust apple, google, ms, aol or whoever else.

I am fairly new to the Mac. I use Windows mostly. However, I was looking at the new Mac Mini Server. It is not a MobileMe Server but seems to do everything MobileMe does.