Hello there,

I've offered to set up an e-mail system for a local community group. I’m not a tech expert, but do have some pretty good basic understanding of these things so I thought what they wanted would be pretty easy to do. It’s actually proving quite tricky though. 

Any help on how I could achieve the following would therefore be really appreciated.

• They need an address book that syncs between a number of computers (both PCs and Macs).
• There’ll be one or two administrators who add contacts ideally using a program on their desktop, rather than something online - it's always slightly cumbersome when you're waiting 
  for the page to load. I thought Outlook would be ideal.
• Contacts will be grouped into lists such as Staff, Customers, or Board. When adding a new contact, if would be great if there was a field (or some other prompt) that reminded people to categorise / add people to the appropriate group. 
• These groups / categories / lists need to sync across all address books - i.e. when anyone writes an e-mail to 'Staff' everyone in the latest version of the group will receive the mail.

I thought this would be simple to do, but am finding it quite a thing to achieve.

I thought Outlook categories would be the solution – especially because the Category tick boxes are perfect when adding a new contact. However, as they don’t sync with Outlook.com (as I understand it), it’s apparently not possible to sync groups/lists across multiple computers (whilst maintaining functionality that allows new people to be added). Or am I missing something?

To be honest, it doesn't have to be Outlook that we use, but I like using it, is cross-platform and the tick box for categories is perfect; it seems the most likely contender to be able to achieve what we want.

As I say, this feels like it should be really simple, but I'm really struggling - any help would be much appreciated.

Many thanks,

tim