We’re in the home stretch of wedding planning for my son Todd.  He is marrying his high school sweetheart and we couldn’t be more thrilled.  We adore Emmanuelle and her family.  But this post is not about gushing about love, romance and wedding bells, it’s about spreadsheets, photo editing, and logistics.

Planning a wedding involves lots of coordination and logistics.  All of this is a little more complicated given modern day lifestyles.  Todd and Emmanuelle (Emu) live in Pittsburgh where they are attending medical school.  Emmanuelle’s parents and we live in the Bay Area near the wedding location but all four parents are working full time – not easy to get together in-person for projects and planning.

The cloud and SugarSync are definitely helping manage in this environment.  An example is the video we want to make for the rehearsal dinner.  Our idea (not original) is to do a photo montage, set to music with photos of both Todd and Emu growing up then pictures of them together.  I set up a shared folder in SugarSync for all the pictures.  We’re all working on our subsets – culling down to a reasonable number (not easy as we like looking at the cute baby pictures but there is some limit to what the guests want to see), ordering etc.  The nice thing is that we can do this at any time, even offline (e.g. for us on the plane home from Italy) and it will all sync.  Working with the photo files and filenames on the local machine is a lot more convenient then pure cloud but in the end the cloud is doing the coordination and synchronization for us.

Spreadsheets, table assignments, todo lists are all being handled the same way. Ditto for copies of budgets, files, contracts.  Using the cloud and SugarSync.  The one thing we are doing via Google docs (to allow for simultaneous multi-person editing of a single file) is the RSVP tracking.  I must say that while it works well for that use case it is a good reminder that I won’t be doing a lot of independent spreadsheets in Google docs anytime soon.  Much less responsive and a hassle work with compared with Excel (more on that in another post) but the comparison was useful.

There are lots of online wedding planning tools but having planned many events including 4 bar/bat mitzvahs and my eldest son’s wedding what works best for me is to use my general work tools Office, iLife, email plus the cloud.  Have you planned any events using the cloud? What has worked best for you?