Sorting Out Your Contacts
April 9th, 2008This should be helpful for Mac users who use Gmail and/or Salesforce. For various reasons, I sometimes use all of these apps/devices for accessing email and contacts.
- Address Book on Mac OS X
- Outlook 2007 on XP (on Parallels on my MacBook Pro)
- Google Apps - IMAP (Gmail)
- iPhone
- Salesforce.com - All our customer data is in this system
How do you get all your contacts in all these places?
Step 1
You have to use Address Book as the primary data store. I have contacts in here that I don’t need in Salesforce, because they are friends and family.
So the first step is supplementing this with all my customer data from Salesforce. No problem in Outlook 2007 as you just install Salesforce Outlook Edition and sync with Salesforce. However, there is no equivalent solution from Salesforce for Address Book on Mac OS X.
Luckily, these clever chaps are working on an open source tool that does this:
This is in beta, but it works fine for me.
Step 2
Now I just sync my iPhone via iTunes and I have all my customer information on my phone. Easy.
Step 3
Now I want everything in Gmail as well so that I can access all the contacts, if for any reason, I can only use web mail.
This simple utility exports your Address Book to a .csv file that can be imported into Gmail.
Conclusion
This is a satisfactory but still manual process for getting all contacts data everywhere I want. Ideally this would be all achieved via iSync on Mac OS X, however, I think this will probably be a little while away.
