Word of wisdom about iCloud based on my experience

Question

I have spent hours researching the functionality of iCloud last night. The steps below may help you avoid a lot of pitfalls if you are interested in inutilizing iCloud for the purposes of sharing content and synchronization between members of your family or very small company. Please read the steps in their entirety before following these instructions if you choose to do so. 
1. If you have a family or a small company where you want to share certain content (Content purchased on iTunes, iWork documents, etc.) among the members, use the existing (pre-iCloud) Apple ID that you have been using as the iTunes account for sometime now and under which you made most of your iTunes purchases, and create a master iCloud account using this Apple ID (see Step 3). For those who never had an @me.com account, this master iCloud account based on the iTunes account's Apple ID will be a non @me.com account - a lot of people have been using @gmail.com accounts for this purpose.
2. Create several personal iCloud accounts by going to Settings/SystemPreferences -> iCloud in your iOS 5 device or Mac OS 10.7.2 (or later), respectively.  Each family/company member will use one (or more) personal iCloud account(s) as their personal email account as well as for syncing their personal Mail, Contacts, Calendar, and Notes. Once you create each of these accounts under Settings/System Preferences -> iCloud either in iOS 5 (or later) or Mac OS 10.7.2 (or later), remove such a newly created account from Settings/System Preferences -> iCloud and create another one if needed.
Caution: iCloud accounts can be created only from iOS 5 (or later) or from Mac OS 10.7.2 (or later). You can only create 3 iCloud accounts from each iOS device an/or each Mac, so use your quotas sparingly and with much thought. iCloud accounts cannot be created from the www.icloud.com web site.
3. Remove the last personal iCloud account from Settings/System Preferences-> iCloud and go to Step 4.
4. Create a master iCloud account as described in Step 1 by going to iCloudSettings/System Preferences -> iCloud in iOS 5 (or later) or Mac OS 10.7.2(or later) and entering your pre-iCloud Apple ID which you have been using for most of your iTunes purchases before iCloud went live on October 12, 2011. You will be asked if you want to create an @me.com email account for email synchronization under your pre-existing Apple ID (about to become your iCloud master account). This is where you get a chance to tie your pre-iCloud Apple ID that uses a non @me.com email account with a brand new @me.com email account. Don't screw this up. If there is a particular ID you want to claim on the @me.com domain and tie that @me.com ID to your pre-iCloud Apple ID/iTunes ID, you only get one chance to do this right. Therefore, in Step 2 (see above) you should not try to create an iCloud account with the @me.com address that you want to tie to your pre-iCloud Apple ID; otherwise, you have lost your chancet o tie the two IDs together.
5. Use your non @me.com Apple ID as your master iCloud account on each iOS device and each Mac that belongs to your family/company. You get to chose which services you want to sync with this iCloud account. You do not have to choose Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Notes, and/or other services to sync with this master iCloud account, but you probably want to use this account for backing up each iOS device into this iCloud account, enable Photo Stream on this account (probably for a family, but not a company), and enable iWork document syncing on this account for shared document storage. You will most likely have to pay extra to increase your storage quota on this master iCloud account from the free 5GB to the amount of space that suits your needs.
6. Now configure one (or more) newly created (in Step 2) personal iCloud accounts by going to Settings/System Preferences -> Mail, Contacts,Calendars  in iOS 5 (or later) and in Mac OS 10.7.2 (or later). Each ofthese accounts can be configured to sync Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and/or Notes, depending on each individual user's preferences. Each of these personal iCloud accounts comes with 5GB of free storage. If you use these accounts only for Mail, Contacts, Calendar, and/or Notes, you will probably not exceed the free 5GB storage quota on any of these accounts.
7. Each member of the family/company can share his/her calendar(s) with other members, and those whose calendars are shared with others, can create events and invite others to the events. The invitations come as push notifications, and are instantaneous (both on iOS devices and on Macs). I think this also works with Microsoft Outlook. When one receives such an invitation, one can either accept it or reject it. This response is delivered back to the person who created the event. If one accepts the invitation, the event is entered into invitee's calendar, which is synced with all other devices owned by the invitees via iCloud.

Answer 1

Duh... what are you talking about?
I found:
Update all at the same time Don't use iOS 4.3.5 or below.
If you upgrade to Lion 10.7.2 (cloud support) and you turn the system on, it will convert local calenders, contacts etc to a cloud based version. (will work offline as well)
However... sync with iTunes with everyting checked on your iDevice info tab will restore the local calendars as well again if you didn't upgrade your iDevice and switched on the cloud services as well.
Well, now you got everything twice... double entries in your addressbook, double birthdays in your calendar... it;s all very confusing. Use common sense, invest some time and you will manage it.
Once set up... it kicks ***.
BUT if you use OUTLOOK FOR MAC as well, and leave the outlook sync service on... you run into even more troubles.
Outlook for Mac syncs with local databases only and will also restore them if not present...
IT DOES NOT SYNC with the cloud. For now you will need to rely on native iCal, adressbook and mail... :-(
A fix from microsoft will be needed to communicate with the iCloud storage system.
Good luck upgrading everybody... took me hours to figure... :-)
A wizzard would have been nice APPLE.
My advice:
1) Sync your iDevices one last time with iTunes.
2) Upgrade to Lion 10.7.2
3) Turn off all sync services in Outlook if you use Outlook.
(Outlook can still be your Email client... but that's it for now, the rest will be broken.)
3) Turn on iCloud, your local databases are turning into the cloud version. (if you turn a cloud service off, it will ask if you want to keep a local version > the old version.)
4) Upgrade your iDevices to iOS 5...
5) Turn on cloud services on your iDevices and you're done.