Contact Sharing

We have had to suspend the Contact Sharing feature of CloudM Manage due to an unforeseen technical change, and the feature will be removed in the next release, scheduled for the week commencing 21st February 2022.

What is Contact Sharing?

In CloudM Manage, you can create custom lists (groups) of Gmail contacts and automatically sync them to the Gmail account of a CloudM Manage user or users. These groups can include internal contacts (i.e. users on your domain) and external contacts (i.e. suppliers, customers, and partners).

Users can also create personal Contact Groups in Google Contacts (by creating a label and assigning contacts from their existing Contacts list), and they will be automatically synced to their profile in CloudM Manage, ready for sharing, if necessary.

Using Contact Sharing, you can make sure that your colleagues have access to all the contact details they need on day one. No more needing to ask for the email address of a partner or John in Sales. It is there already, in their contact list.

Users can also be given specific permissions to make changes to the Contact Group in Google, which will sync the changes to all other users that the Contact Group is shared with.

What CloudM Manage permissions do I need?

• All users have the ability to share their own personal Contact Groups, but can only send a share request that the recipient can either approve or decline.
• A user with the Manage Users permission can also share Contact Groups on other user profiles, and have the ability to either send a share request to the recipient, or force the Contact Group to sync to the user (without confirmation from the recipient).

Creating a new Contact Group (or adding users to an existing Contact Group)

Firstly, and importantly, you can't just share the contact details of a single contact. Gmail is designed in such a way that contacts are grouped (using labels) so, even if you only include one contact, you need to create a new Contact Group. 

To create a Contact Group in CloudM Manage:

1. Specify the Contacts that you want to share. This can be done in one of the following ways:
   • Use the Search bar to find all users that meet a specific criteria (for example, they all have "Manager" as a profile tag), select the contacts that you want from the results list, and then choose Copy to Contact Group from the Actions drop down menu.
   • Convert an Organizational Unit to a Contact Group (Directory > Org Units > {OU} > Actions > Convert to Smart Contact Group). A Smart Contact group is a dynamic group that automatically includes the contact details of new members if they meet a set criteria (which, in the case of an OU, would be membership of the OU). See the Create a Smart Contact article for details on setting the Smart Contact Group.
   • Select a single user or external contact to create the Contact Group and add subsequent contacts as needed. Navigate to the profile pop out for the user or contact and select Copy to Contact Group.
2. If you have selected an option to Copy to Contact Group, you will see a pop-up box that allows you to either add the contact to an Existing Contact Group (by choosing an option from the drop down menu) or enter the name of a New Contact Group to create it.
   • If you enter the name of an Existing Contact Group in the New Contact Group field, the contacts will automatically be added to the existing group.

3. Select Copy.
4. Once the process has finished, go to your profile and select Contacts. The new Contact Group will now appear in your Group Labels list, or the new contacts will be added to the existing Contact Group specified (which will now also appear in your list if it wasn't previously).

Sharing a Contact List to Gmail accounts on your domain

Now that you have chosen the contacts, you will need to choose which users you want to share the Contact Group with.

To share a Contact List:

1. Go to your profile panel (or, if you are an admin, the profile panel of a user already has access to the Contact Group shared with them), and select the Contacts tab,

2. Hover over the name of the Contact Group that you want to share until the Share icon appears.
3. Click on the Share icon.

4. A pop-up screen will appear.

5. In the text box, enter the name of the user that you want to share the Contact Group with. This must be a user in your domain with an account setup in CloudM Manage.
6. Click on the icons next to the text box to specify what the user can do with the Contact Group, with changes synced to all other users that the Contact Group has been shared with.
   • Pencil - Allow user to edit contacts
   • Plus - Allow user to add contacts
   • X - Allow user to delete contacts
   • Person - Allow user to change the list of shares
7. Select Add to add the user.
8. Repeat steps 5 and 6 until you have added all the users that you want to add the Contact Group to.
9. Next, select the drop down menu and decide whether you want to Send share offers (which will send an email to the user that allows them to decide whether they want to add the Contact Group to their Gmail account) or Share and Synchronize immediately (which will automatically sync the Contact Group to the user's Gmail account without any interaction or confirmation from the user).

10. Select Share.

Checking that the Share has worked (in Google)

• A user can check by selecting the Contacts option on their Google apps menu. The Google apps menu is the icon of a square made of 9 circles that you can see on your Gmail screen. The Contact Group will appear under the Labels section and selecting it will show all the contacts that are included.

• The names of contacts within the Contact Group will also appear as suggestions when you enter a name or email address in the recipients bar (To, Cc, Bcc) when composing an email.