Global Address Books of your Account Users

LuxSci has updated its Address Books with a new feature enabling administrators to create address books that are automatically populated with, and synchronized with, the contact information of all the users in the account or of all the users in selected domains.   If your organization has many people in it, this feature, combined with the ability to share these address books with everyone, makes it simple to have a global, shared, always updated address book for your entire organization.

This shared address book can then be accessed over ActiveSync, CardDAV, and used in WebMail for email composition.

Here is how it works.

Enabling synchronization of user contact information with an address book

1. Create a new Address Book, if you would like a dedicated address book for your company users.
2. Open the “WebAide Properties” of the Address Book that you would like to synchronize.
   1. This can be done by right-clicking on the Address Book’s name and then clicking on “WebAide Properties” when in the Address Book interface, or by clicking on the Address Book’s name in the “Apps: WebAides” management page:
3. This opens the “General” properties.
4. In the section “Auto-synchronize with user contact information” choose either:
   1. “Add users in account” to include “all users”
   2. “All users in selected domains” (and then choose one or more domains) to include only users whose logins are in those specific domains.
5. Press “Update.

That’s it!  If you want to share, this Address Book with others, use the “Sharing” menu item in the left menu to select who will have access to it.

How does synchronization work?

Synchronization runs every 15 minutes (so be patient).    Each time it runs, it will consider each address book configured for synchronization and:

1. Add contact entries for all users that should be synchronized with the address book, which have not yet been added by the sync process.
2. Updates contact entries for all users whose contact information has changed.
3. Deletes entries that were added by the synchronization process which correspond to users who should no longer be synchronized (e.g., because they were deleted or because the synchronization settings were altered).

The contact information used for maintaining these contact entries is obtained from each user’s “Contact Information” page in the user interface.  Both users and administrators can view and update that data.  The following information is synchronized:

• Name
• Home Address (street1, street2, city, state, zip, country)
• Organization
• Primary phone, Other phone, Cell phone
• Email 1, Email 2
• Custom field 1, Custom field 2, Custom field 3 (if you are using custom fields).

When a user’s contact information is changed, the values of all of these fields are updated in the address book entry; all other fields are left unchanged.  So, when you edit a synchronized entry and add things like attachments, notes, a picture, a birthday, etc. , these values areunaffected by subsequent synchronization updates.

Contacts added to the address book outside of the synchronization process are ignored by that process.  So, feel free to add other people to the address book; they will not be affected by the sync.

Additionally, if you delete a contact that was created by the synchronization process, it will be re-created on the next synch.  You can not exclude specific users from the synchronization.

You can create any number of address books that are synchronizing with your users (or various subsets of your users).  Only account administrators can create address books that synchronize with “all users” in the account.

One thing to be aware of… when users are deleted, their corresponding contact entries will also be deleted automatically.

Please contact LuxSci support if you have any questions about this feature.