ICal, iCloud, and meeting invitation woes

Question

Hi all. Fair warning - I'm brand new to the Mac world. I'm a long-time Windows user who now has a shiny new MacBook Pro, primarily for the benefit of what I can already tell is superior hardware.
On the software side, however, I'm struggling with the migration. I've solved most of my issues, but one is really eluding me. I have Office 2011, including Outlook, but I keep being told by Mac users that Outlook on the Mac is buggy and is inferior to using iCal, Apple Mail, and Address Book. Ok, I'll bite. I've been trying to use these tools as my primary means for handling my mail and calendar needs. This is where I run into trouble.
My world of data, like most people's, is split into two:  work and personal. For personal, I primarly use google tools including google calendar and gmail. For work, I have an IMAP mail system with a work e-mail account, but we have no work-based calendar server. I have an iPad2 and an iPhone4. This is all relevant because what I want is to have mail and events, both work and personal, synchronized and accessible across all my devices over "the cloud." The personal side is easy enough to handle. I added my google calendar to iCal, just like I added it on my phone and iPad, so no worries there. E-mail, similarly, is simple enough. The issue is when I try to figure out how to handle my work calendar.
My first thought was iCloud - but my Apple ID, used by iCloud is based on my personal e-mail account (gmail). I've found that when I try to add an event to my iCloud "work" calendar in iCal and invite attendees (a very very common practice in my business world), the invitation comes from my gmail account and my gmail account is listed as the organizer of the event. This is a huge problem for me. In searching online, people suggest all sorts of different ways of solving this. Re-ordering the e-mail addresses on the "Me" contact card in Address Book. Re-ordering the accounts in Mail. I even went as far as deleting my gmail account from both Mail and Address Book. Nothing works. I'm assuming that because the event is created in iCloud, that the organizer is set to the Apple ID that is associated with the iCloud account, and there seems to be nothing I can do about that.
My second thought was to create another Apple ID and use that one to create a new iCloud calendar for my work life, but I'm under the impression that you can't have more than one iCloud account actively syncing on an iPhone or iPad.
My current solution is to have a calendar that is only "On My Mac" that I create work events on. I've found that if I have Mail set to send new messages, by default, from my work e-mail address, then new meeting invitations on the Mac-only calendar are sent on behalf of my work account, with my work account listed as the organizer. This solution, while working on the Mac itself, does not solve my synchronization issues with my iPhone and iPad. I suppose I could sync through iTunes, but my calendar is so active that I'd really prefer to have a cloud-based solution.
All that being said - is there a cloud-based solution to having both a personal and work calendar, with each calendar being associated with different e-mail addresses? Is there any way to change the e-mail account associated with a specific calendar in either iCal or iCloud? If not, there probably should be!
Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

Hello there.
Exact same situation here. Do you have a solution yet? Also for me its not acceptable to send meeting invitations from my personal account which is also my apple id...