Resolved Snycing Everything

This is a bit of a long post but I want to try to cover as many bases as possible as I have more questions than answers at this point. Any assistance or thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks for reading this in advance

I am assisting a friend with his company’s IT setup and have something in mind but, would like some advice from those of you who may be more familiar with how this could come together

• The friend is a landscape contractor
• He spends 95% of the day either on a job site or doing sales calls to provide quotes
• He has an office manager
• He also has a part time landscape design person in the office

He wants to be able to sync and access his documents, images, email, address book and calendar across his devices.

The current configuration:

• Office
  • [FONT=&quot]d[/FONT]esktop (Win 7 Home) used by office manager
  • running Office Home & Student
  • older laptop (Vista Home) used by landscape design person
    
  • running Office Home & Student – not currently using Outlook
  • Internet access is semi-rural so while it is high speed, it isn’t very fast

• email
  • Blackberry for email and web surfing while on the road
  • not ideal for typing given the size of his fingers
  • right now he fields all email on the blackberry
  • there is a lot of mail that should go to the office so he doesn’t have to deal with it

• website
  • uses it to show clients pictures of sample work

I am a Windows user and I am thinking a Windows based tablet would work seamlessly with his Windows computers and a Windows phone if he makes the switch.

He is happy to make a wholesale change in order to achieve the desired results.

My thinking is:

• Office

• Replace Vista laptop with a desktop (I will call it “design”)
• Not sure whether to add Windows 7 or go with Win 8
• Does one offer synchronizing capability over the other?
• Upgrade to Office Home & Business to add Outlook on all machines/devices

​

• Email
  • Replace the blackberry (contract is over) with a Windows phone for consistency of applications across devices
  • Create new accounts using his domain’s email server
  • Set up email accounts on the appropriate users device so mail is channeled to the appropriate account

• Calendar
  • Create a central Calendar in Outlook synced across all devices to be up to date
  • Here I am confused as in some places I read that the Outlook Calendar will not sync with other devices and in other places I read that it will
  • I found that one can use the MS Outlook Calendar Sharing Service which would seem to do the trick however I now see that "The Web tools formerly used to manage and preview calendars published with the Outlook Calendar Publishing Service have been discontinued "

• · In field
  • Add a Windows Pro based tablet or Ultrabook device running Office
  • This would obviously be Windows 8
  • How would this work with Windows 7 in syncing data?
  • Outdoor screen capability on whatever unit is important
  • I read that the MS Surface Pro has good outdoor capability “the screen has an impressively high 400-nit brightness rating; thanks to that spec, in particular, outdoor visibility won't be a problem”

• Quoting
  • Not sure on how to best achieve sync capabilities across Windows devices for documents, pictures, etc.
  • Thinking that cloud storage is the key to this

Any assistance or thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance

 

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Thanks guys, good points. All will be investigated