Creating a shared iOS contact list/address book for small biz VOIP setup
April 6, 2017 5:17 AM Subscribe
On the surface it seems like this should be simple - A staff of 12 people, replacing deskphones with iPhones. How can we establish and maintain a contact list that is native to iOS's phone book for caller ID and outbound calling purposes?
Next month our team is moving to a new office and part of that move is that we are ditching wired physical handsets, and moving to a hosted PBX service on a superfast net connection. The idea here is that instead of taking our ugly wired deskphones with us, everyone will run Bria clients on their personal iPhones as SIP extensions.
We've already done all the testing here which has been great. Bria is solid, especially with Callkit support, and theres no issues with quality etc.
The biggest hurdle is how we can share a common phone book, so we can identify callers via caller ID that match to a 'master' directory, as well as independently maintain and add new contacts for outbound calls that will sync with the rest of the group so we're not always looking things up on email etc.
The Bria iOS client only interfaces with the native iOS contact list, so I thought surely there must be some straightforward service out there that will let us do this, either via LDAP or CardDAV, but everything that I have found seems to be overkill in terms of both price and features, or involves very clunky workarounds.
I feel like theres an more obvious solution out there that I might be missing? (Fwiw, we are all gsuite users in case there is some solution there?)
Thank you!
Next month our team is moving to a new office and part of that move is that we are ditching wired physical handsets, and moving to a hosted PBX service on a superfast net connection. The idea here is that instead of taking our ugly wired deskphones with us, everyone will run Bria clients on their personal iPhones as SIP extensions.
We've already done all the testing here which has been great. Bria is solid, especially with Callkit support, and theres no issues with quality etc.
The biggest hurdle is how we can share a common phone book, so we can identify callers via caller ID that match to a 'master' directory, as well as independently maintain and add new contacts for outbound calls that will sync with the rest of the group so we're not always looking things up on email etc.
The Bria iOS client only interfaces with the native iOS contact list, so I thought surely there must be some straightforward service out there that will let us do this, either via LDAP or CardDAV, but everything that I have found seems to be overkill in terms of both price and features, or involves very clunky workarounds.
I feel like theres an more obvious solution out there that I might be missing? (Fwiw, we are all gsuite users in case there is some solution there?)
Thank you!
Best answer: The Gsuite Global Directory (or similar shared list)? It looks like that should tie into the native iOS Contacts app.
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I will note that I had the same setup on my desktop (Mac OS X) - the Fonality HUD client and a Bria softphone, and the mobile setup seemed to be an extension of that main configuration - meaning that no one had just their iPhone as their main device, everyone used the desktop clients on a daily basis and the mobile clients only when they were out and about and needed to be contacted. So I'm not sure if you need one to have the other, if that makes sense.
posted by ralan at 9:14 AM on April 6, 2017