Context

Shared Contacts for Gmail® is an application that allows user to share contact and contact groups the same way their share Google Docs… with a button “Share”!

As for Google docs and Google Calendars, all invited user will see in real time the updated contacts in their shared address books and will be able to update them as well.

RJF International Corporation is a customer-oriented manufacturer of engineered polymer products for select specialty markets. RJF is leader in their market thanks to constant innovation and technical know-how.
The 550 employees of RJF needed a solution that could help them to collaborate easily on all enterprise data. Google apps was the solution, Shared Contacts for Gmail® was the decision trigger.

Challenge

When RJF International Corporation decided to make the move from Lotus Notes to Google Apps, the whole staff was excited to switch to an innovative solution that proves to be simple, user friendly as tools people use at home, as well as a real gain of productivity and substantial savings.

However, even if Google Apps offers revolutionary tools to organization, one missing feature was likely to compromise a swift migration: The shared contacts. A lot of their users were sharing address-books in Lotus notes and it was unacceptable for them to give up this functionality.

Of course, Google apps offers the possibility to manage a central GAL (Global Address List), but this GAL is automatically shared with the whole company, and we cannot restrict its access to some users. Moreover, the shared contacts of the Global Address List do not appear in the Gmail Contact Manager: users have to search them and cannot modify them: It was therefore impossible to really “collaborate” on shared contacts.

Solution

After trying several applications of the Google Marketplace to share contacts, RJF International Corporation selected Shared Contacts for Gmail® thanks to its stability, its efficiency and the fact that it was easy to use.
Users keep on using their existing Google user-interface, the app does not add a third-party user interface, which doesn’t disorient the users.

The sharing interface for administrator provides the same user experience as the “share” feature of Google Docs and the contacts are quickly synchronized between users and company iPhones, iPads or certain e-mail clients.

“Our benchmark of applications for sharing contacts naturally led us to choose Shared Contacts for Gmail®” says Stacey McDonald, Manager of CRM Applications at RJC.