Executive Summary
Technology Made Simple, the premiere on-call IT service provider for the Chicago area, has been in business since 2004. One of their clients, AA Service Co.—a large-scale heating and air conditioning service company—has successfully used itrezzo (on-premise Exchange contact management solution for smartphones followed by CiraSync (Azure-based SaaS for Microsoft 365 contact management for smartphones) to automate the management of contacts on employee smartphones since 2015. (CiraApps Ltd. and itrezzo are sister companies.)
Challenge of Manual Contact Management on Smartphones
By 2013-2014, small and medium-sized businesses like AA Service have been rapidly adopting modern technologies such as cable business internet, cloud storage platforms such as Dropbox and SharePoint, and Microsoft 365. In addition, field staff at all types and sizes of companies have adopted 4G smartphones like the iPhone 5s and 5c, along with Android devices as a key communications tool.
Similarly, AA Service Co. employees began to use smartphones to keep in touch with colleagues, key suppliers, and technical resources. The requirement from the staff was reliable and accurate contacts, regularly synced, shared, and updated across the team’s smartphones and without an automated software solution, manually managing contacts on business smartphones became a nightmare for IT.
Business smartphones would be deployed with a static list of contacts, both within the Exchange GAL and Public Folder contacts. Inevitably, staff would come and go, change numbers, and business relationships would change. Since their in-house Exchange server could access the contact management database built into the smartphone operating system, AA Service Co. was faced with managing constantly changing contacts.
“I wholeheartedly endorse CiraSync as a thoroughly robust, stable, cost-effective, and intuitive platform for ending the chaos of contact management on smartphones.”
Bruce Carlson, IT Manager, AA Service Co
Ending the Chaos of Manual Contact Management on Smartphones
Bruce Carlson, IT Manager at Technology Made Simple, started researching a better way to automatically manage contacts on smartphones and found a relevant post on the IT professional network Spiceworks. In September of 2015, the AA Service management and staff agreed that the itrezzo solution was the right one for the company until they migrated to Microsoft 365. A year later, once they migrated from their in-house Exchange server to Microsoft 365 Exchange Online, the company trialed and then adopted the CiraSync SaaS solution.
Today, even though AA Service Co. deploys the Outlook client on both iPhones and Android devices, they also enable the contact sync portion from the Exchange GAL and other Public Folder contacts using the native contact management system for iPhones and Android devices.
The company has stated that the CiraSync experience cleanly integrates with the contact management system on the iPhone and Android platform which includes all the features of the phone’s dialing software.
“CiraSync just works and now everyone is happy!” exclaimed Carlson. “With all the disjointed technologies in play, it is great to have CiraSync as the integrator to keep contact management from being out-of-control.”
Summary
The company says they’ve found CiraSync to be the only solution that can manage contacts on multiple smartphones and allow quick Over the Air (OTA) updating of all devices as staff change and external contact information changes. They quickly run a CiraSync update after any contact change, and within a short period of time, all smartphones have been updated with the new contact information.
