With CiraSync, users can sync Microsoft 365 GAL and Public Folder contacts directly to their smartphone. This is helpful because Microsoft 365 and smartphone applications don’t provide users with a mechanism to sync Public Folders or the entire Global Address List to employee smartphones.
Without an automated Public Folder or GAL sync solution, employees waste time looking up current contact information and are forced to make manual updates on smartphones.
This article will break down 16 Reasons to Sync Microsoft Office 365 GAL and Public Folders to Smartphones!
1. Time Usage and Effectiveness
Many employees consider their smartphone the most important technology they use throughout the day. You want to optimize both your time and your effectiveness using it. When you search for a person by their name, job title, or department, you can’t afford to get bogged down.
2. Accuracy
It’s not just about time management. You need to identify the correct person to call, and the correct number to contact them. Wrong numbers waste time and can be embarrassing.
3. Reduce Surprises
It’s important to know who is calling or texting you. This helps you prioritize the incoming barrage.
4. Location
If your company went to the trouble and expense to create lists of industry contacts from suppliers, service vendors, emergency contacts, and partners, then employees are meant to have them ready to use. That means in the smartphone itself. Think of it this way: anywhere else that you store these contacts, their value is x. In the smartphone, their value immediately becomes 10x.
5. Protect the Company Mission
Nearly every organization has sizable groups of employees who can’t do their jobs unless they can reach internal and external contacts. Shouldn’t they be able to do this immediately from their smartphone? Why burden employees with distractions and obstacles when the challenge is easily solved via automation and central management.
6. Save the Company Money
Your time, and that of your colleagues, is not free. Hunting down phone numbers or updating them on their mobile devices incurs a salary cost that could be $1 per minute or many dollars per minute. Multiply that by dozens of minutes per month per employee, and the cost is worth avoiding!
7. Syncing doesn’t happen by itself
GAL contacts do not sync automatically to Outlook and smartphones. Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook can sync contacts to smartphones. However, these contacts do not automatically get updates from the GAL. There is a widely held, entirely mistaken idea that GAL contacts sync to smartphones. They don’t.
8. Travel Convenience
The CiraSync dashboard can be accessed on any smartphone device that has a web browser. For example, CiraSync users can sync Global Address List data to iphones, Androids, or any other Smartphones on a mobile device. This means users can sync an unlimited number of contacts, shared calendars, and notes multiple times a day on the CiraSync app, even when they’re traveling.
This allows users to sync important time-sensitive data when they’re at home and away from the office but still need to get work or share information immediately.
9. On-the-Go Networking
Networking is an important skill that helps lead business’s to finding more jobs and oppourtunities that are available to them. With CiraSync make networking easier by instantly adding new connections to the Office 365 GAL from your smartphone. This allows you to speak to all of your contacts and potentially meeting new one by syncing you data with all your different co-workers and contacts.
10. Not a Do-It-Yourself Job
One can copy-paste or drag-and-drop contacts from the GAL or Public Folders to every subscriber’s Outlook, one subscriber at a time, but it’s laborious, error-prone, and puts a burden on many users. It often backfires with confusing consequences. For example, have you ever located a customer in your smartphone address book, but then had the frustration of finding three entries with different phone numbers? How can you know which is the latest? See Reason 11 for more!
11. Keep Contact Data Clean and Well-Governed
The IT term for this is data hygiene. There should be a single, central version of the data that everyone draws from. If a phone number is wrong, somebody will complain, and it gets fixed. It’s self-correcting. Crowd-sourced updates become a reality because everybody benefits from every contribution.
12. Bad Eternal Presence in Smartphone Contacts
Obsolete contacts probably won’t be removed from smartphone address books with most sync methods. Calling employees who have left the company or leaving a voicemail with confidential information for a contractor whose engagement ended badly might do more than waste time. It can open a Pandora’s box of ill will. You need a reliable, automated method to remove obsolete contacts.
13. Humans should be thinking, not syncing
It’s nearly always a waste of resources and brainpower when a person syncs contact data manually. What do we mean by manual? Copying from a spreadsheet, typing names into the smartphone, or scraping numbers from an email. Syncing is a task for automation—not for employees.
14. A contact list by itself does little
Contact data on its own is not a solution to business problems. It requires dissemination, and it’s a push problem. Automation is the most effective way to handle that push.
15. Strategic and Managed Contact Distribution
Contacts are a valuable and proprietary resource that should be governed thoughtfully. Not every employee should have the company’s vendor contacts. Not every salesperson should necessarily have the contacts of all customers. The CEO and your board probably don’t want contact data for all 2,000 employees. Employee personal contact information such as home phone and address is on a need-to-know basis, and must be automated to be given to only the right people.
16. Emergency Situations
Like backing up data, it should be done every night. Typically, the discovery that it hasn’t been done consistently or correctly comes at the worst possible time—in a crisis or disaster. The consequences can be costly or disruptive for a business and its customers. Employee safety and welfare could easily be compromised without proper emergency contact information.
In Conclusion
Hopefully this article has helped breakdown some of the different ways the CiraSync can be used to help you sync your Public Folder and GAL data. Public Folders are a simple, efficient way to store information so its important to have a synchronization solution to allow you to easily share all of your data seamlessly. CiraSync also is one of the few GAL synchronization platforms that enables users to automatically sync data from their Global Address List to their smartphones. In addition CiraSync offers a multitude of customizable GAL sync settings which allow you to specify precisely what you would like to sync.
