I am looking to create a shareable central database of contacts that can also sync to smartphones. Can CiraSync provide what I need?

CiraSync would be perfect for you! With the CiraSync Enterprise Edition central management dashboard, you can create contact lists, organize the lists by department and frequency of use, and allow your users to choose who gets which lists. CiraSync will then pull contacts from different sources from Office 365 (GAL, Public Folder, or shared mailboxes), and push them to user mailboxes. The sync will propagate to the smartphones via native exchange connector.