Auto contact sync for you and your team

Another feature Accelo users rave about is the system's ability to synchronize the contacts in Accelo with your address book in Google Contacts or Microsoft Outlook/Exchange/Office365 Contacts! When we were initially developing this feature we were conscious that companies could easily have tens of thousands of contacts, and with the increasing use of smartphones and the way people sync'ed their address books to their phones, we didn't want to overwhelm people by pushing every single contact in Accelo to every single user's address book.

However, more and more people were asking for a solution to two specific headaches:

1. They wanted contacts that *they* created to be automatically synced (since they often forgot to go in and press on the address book icon to do it manually)
2. They also wanted to be able to designate that certain people on their team should also get contacts sync'ed to their address books (and thus their smartphones).

Well we heard you loud and clear and today we're excited to announce that we've released these two new enhancements into beta.

You can enable this functionality by going to the "Integrations" page by clicking on your username, and then when you scroll down to where you'll be able to turn on the checkbox.

To test, simply create a new contact in Accelo, and within a few minutes you'll see them appear in your "Accelo Contact Sync" group in your Google Contacts interface. It's that simple!

We've also made some improvements to the sync process, so now if we find a contact in your Google Contacts address book with a matching firstname, surname and e-mail address, the system will simply update the contact with any missing information - meaning no more duplicate contacts!

Bonus beta feature - sync'ing contacts with a set of colleagues

Sharing contacts across an organization has always been challenging, and since we launched Accelo we've had many users come to us wishing they could solve this headache, so that, for example, all of their account managers could have their address books in sync.

Well, we've solved this problem - starting today, you can also choose to sync the contacts that you push to your address book automatically to the address books of certain colleagues. But there are a couple of limitations:

1. Your colleagues need to already have Google Contact sync enabled, otherwise we're not going to be able to access their address book and push the contacts across.
2. There aren't any approval/acceptance permissions; at this stage, we're trusting you to be smart and responsible and not drive your colleagues crazy by pushing all of your contacts onto them.
3. The sync process is only triggered when you add or update a contact; for your colleagues to have coordinated address books with you, they'll need to also set you up to be someone they push contacts across to, in their own integrations page.

There is, however, a really big advantage to this feature; when you have sync'ed a contact across to your colleagues' address book, and they update the contact in the Google Contacts interface or on their iPhone, within a few minutes the updated contact will be imported back into Accelo and then pushed to your own address book and smartphone, all on its own.

We'd love to know what you think - to share your feedback, please contact us or use our forum at ideas.accelo.com.