I think I might have found a few small, minor bugs:

1) In Solve360, if you don’t have a Job Title for your contact, it wont push through the Company name to Google Contacts.

2) If you had a contact in S360 without a Job Title but only a Company, if you go into your Google contacts and add the Job Title it does get pushed into S360, but the Company name then still doesn’t get pushed back to Google from Solve.

Do you guys see the same issue?

Other than that, this feature is AWESOME

will this work with Google Apps?

can’t wait to start testing this out.

edit: it does work with google apps, but you need to be signed in BEFORE you authenticate so that it doesn’t default to regular gmail.

just playing around, but so far it looks fantastic.

@dspence Thanks for the report, I think we’ve got the job-title dependency resolved it now, thanks.

This is great news!

Regards,
Corbie

This is fantastic, and exactly what I’ve been looking for during the past year. Over the next days I will be trialling more features of S360 and hopefully shall be looking at deploying it in our small organisation.

It is not possible to sync only a particular contact group however. I have a number of groups in gmail contacts such as customers, suppliers, personal, etc in my google apps premier account, but have no way to specify that only my customers should sync with Solve360. Ideally that Customer ‘Group’ should also be then ‘Categorised’ in S360 as customers.

Hope this makes sense

shums - Jan 08, 2010 05:41am

This is fantastic, and exactly what I’ve been looking for during the past year. Over the next days I will be trialling more features of S360 and hopefully shall be looking at deploying it in our small organisation.

It is not possible to sync only a particular contact group however. I have a number of groups in gmail contacts such as customers, suppliers, personal, etc in my google apps premier account, but have no way to specify that only my customers should sync with Solve360. Ideally that Customer ‘Group’ should also be then ‘Categorised’ in S360 as customers.

Hope this makes sense

Hi Shums and welcome!
Yes you can absolutely Sync only specific groups. I have it working and it works like a charm:

In Solve360 get to the screen shown above, then click on :

See how your information is synchronized between systems.

Then you’ll get this displayed telling you how to do it:

Contacts will be created or updated in both systems as necessary. Contacts you delete in one system won’t be deleted in the other system. Category tags become Google contact groups, contact groups will not become category tags. If the same contact is changed in both systems before a synchronization, the changes made here win. Only contacts saved in Google’s My Contacts group are compared.
Solve360   Google
First Name   Name until first space
Last Name   Name after first space
Business Phone   Work Phone
Cellular   Mobile Phone
Business Email   Work Email
Business Address   Work Address
Personal Email   Home email
Home Phone   Home Phone
Home Address   Home Address
Business Website   Website
Background   Notes

thanks for your response.

This answers my question and confirms my doubt that although Category tags become a Google contact group, contact groups will not become category tags.

.. and the way to do it, is to create a category within solve360 with the same name as a group in google contacts and then specify that only that category is synced.

this ensures only that particular google group is synced.

shums - Jan 08, 2010 02:12pm

.. and the way to do it, is to create a category within solve360 with the same name as a group in google contacts and then specify that only that category is synced.

this ensures only that particular google group is synced.

Exactly!

Buy’ ngop !

Fred>Google>Ethel AND Ethel>Google>Fred work amazingly well.

Dare I try syncing ALL data?

You guys are little miracle makers . . . . . not that you are necessarily little in ANY way, but in the cosmic sense, the fact that I got the Apple thingee to work with the Fred and Google thingees is, in its own way, miraculous.

And messages like this are why I have so few friends . . . .

Thanks,
Kathleen

PS.  Buy’ ngop is Klingon for “Good News”  Also, for new readers, we Fred is Solve360 and Ethel is the Iphone.  Sometimes they get along with each other . . .

Kathleen Howard - Jan 11, 2010 12:32pm

Buy’ ngop !

Fred>Google>Ethel AND Ethel>Google>Fred work amazingly well.

Dare I try syncing ALL data?

You guys are little miracle makers . . . . . not that you are necessarily little in ANY way, but in the cosmic sense, the fact that I got the Apple thingee to work with the Fred and Google thingees is, in its own way, miraculous.

And messages like this are why I have so few friends . . . .

Thanks,
Kathleen

PS.  Buy’ ngop is Klingon for “Good News”  Also, for new readers, we Fred is Solve360 and Ethel is the Iphone.  Sometimes they get along with each other . . .

Thanks for that Kathleen, you just made my day! Funny stuff!

What is supposed to happen to an archived contact. Will it sync?

Archived contacts are not included in the sync source.

I have S360 contacts synced to 4 people in our office who all use google apps, so that they all share their contacts with S360 and everyone thereby shares a common customer contact information in google contacts.

ie A,B,C & D at office all set up their chosen contacts to a common Group called S360contacts and they all sync with the S360 contacts.

But this creates duplicates on S360 and multiple duplicates, and triplicate customers on google apps contacts for each of us.

We have to manually merge duplicates every time.

is there no way around this?

Solve does support your configuration of multiple users syncing their own Google account to the same set of Solve contacts.  Just for info, it does not however support syncing the same Solve user account to multiple Google accounts.

A best practice is to start by deleting the contacts and groups in Google and any other system you are syncing with so the first sync from Solve is “clean”. 

We have many clients now using this feature with no issues.  We have however had a couple of clients report duplicates.  This appears to be triggered by Google also syncing with a device, but this is not been proven.  We’re still monitoring this so if you can reproduce this behavior please contact our support team (info on website) and they’ll work through it with you.

In your case it would only take one of the users to have an issue, creating new contacts back into solve, which would propagate new (duplicate) contacts to the other users as well.

To reset the contacts back to an ideal state both systems have a merge duplicates feature that should be run before resyncing.

Steve,

Despite your patient and almost endless help, my once “perfect” syncing is now entertaining itself by creating unending duplicate records . . . .

Perhaps you can find another clue herein:

For one week I was able to sync from S360 to Google Contacts to Ipod by using the Google Mobile Sync (MS Exchange - I think).  This was 100% accurate at about 3700 contacts.  All changes made on the Ipod synced correctly back to S360 and vice versa.

Then, noticing some erosion of synced data, I deleted all the Google and Ipod contacts, then created a clean sync as I had done a week earlier.  The results were chaotic . . .

You suggested using Itunes to sync the contacts, as that has been working well for you.

I restarted the process with a clean sync to Google Contacts only, which created duplicates in Google Contacts AND back to S360.  You say that you suspect this might be caused by conflicts in syncing to Google Contacts and a device, but I had disabled the device syncing and I have still been unable to get a sustainable duplicate free sync from S360 to Google Contact.

I am looking forward to your being able to resolve and/or improve on this issue.

As always, I appreciate your help.

Kathleen

We’ve been logging and reviewing all the sync activity recently, looking for conditions where this could or did happen.  We’ve seen cases where Google is, at times, not providing all the information expected.  We’ve made a few changes on the Solve end to handle these conditions and added additional logic for a “sanity check”. Please let us know if you see any new duplicates.

Hi,

After I started syncing with google some of my contact groups in google are deleted (or the contacts in the groups are taken out). Any ideas why?

K

I can confirm that the sync process specifically does not delete any items (contacts or Google groups).  We implemented this unusual policy to remove any doubt that the sync process could inadvertently remove data.

I recently noticed some, not all, of my contacts created duplicates across Google and Solve360.  I removed duplicates manually in Solve, ran a sync, logged in again to Google but the duplicates in Google were not removed.  Is anyone else still reporting bugs with Google sync?  Or am I doing something wrong.

Solve now uses a secondary “sanity check” to check if under any scenario a duplicate would be created (it’s not common, but it’s complex process and we’ve seen it happen where to a human the contacts appear the same, but to the machine they are different).  You should not see new duplicate contacts created by the sync process.

The sync never deletes contacts—you need to remove them manually from Google.  To ensure you delete the correct one(s) you could just delete all having the same name and Solve will recreate the one you remaining in the Solve account.

I am not sure what sanity check means.  But yes, in my case duplicates were not identical.  However, all the duplicates said “created 3 days ago” and I am sure I did not make changes or duplicates.  I sometimes use Mozilla Thunderbird as an email client connected to Solve server with a Google sync add-in.  Could it be Mozillas address book is creating duplicates in Google which then transfer to Solve’?  Either way, I can ditch the email client program and work directly in Solve web mail which I like.  I thought a sync created a mirror on both ends so not sure why if you remove a contact in Solve it will not be removed in Google.

Update:  Just logged in and after manually removing duplicates in Solve 4 hours ago, and a few non-identical (but same name) just re-appeared so I removed the Google connection.  I can only assume that is the issue.  If it helps, the difference between duplicates is one had address info and the other did not.  All other info was the same.

After the systems have figure out what needs to be synced the “sanity” check does a second test to review the changes the same way you would i.e. “is it logical to create this contact when another with the same name exists” (even though they are reportedly different contacts).

I thought a sync created a mirror on both ends so not sure why if you remove a contact in Solve it will not be removed in Google.

The sync process will never delete a contact in either system (a constraint we imposed on the feature).

If you are able to reproduce a duplicate under any scenario we’d love to review it.  Just reach out to our support team to compare notes.

We are in the process of moving all of our users to Google Apps and eventually Norada.  Would it be possible to setup a way to only synchronize the Google Contacts owned by the Google Apps domain instead of synching to an individual user’s account?  That kind of setup would be much more useful in an environment where a company wants to control which contacts get synchronized across their organization.

Is it possible to map and sync additional fields between Google Contacts and S360?