Contacts have been one of the hardest things to get… just… right… on the Apple platform for some time. This began back in the era of Now Contacts syncing with Apple’s Address Book applications and Palm Pilots and has persistently been a thorn in the side of many a tech, engineer, and consultant for a long time. The generations of contact pain flowed into different CRM systems and getting contacts on iPhones and Outlook. The result has been years of duplicate contacts found in silos that get out of sync when that iPad in the closet or the old MacBook that still has something we suddenly need gets fired up after a few months not being used and causes contacts to show up all over the place yet again.
Well, as is so often the case technology gets better and better. And I just kinda’ missed how and when the minor evolutions got us to a good place finally. This isn’t to say that other people won’t have similar symptoms to mine with different root causes. Nor to say that all problems are the same. But there is a good way to keep data in sync between devices now.
The Single Source Of Truth
Let’s start with that concept of a single source of truth. There isn’t exactly just one any more. But luckily the wonderful Outlook development team at Microsoft obviously uses their own products and hears our pain. So for the purposes of this article we’re going to have all contact data flowing out of other apps and into Apple’s Contacts, hosted on iCloud.
Before we begin, let’s first make sure that all future contacts we create and work with go to iCloud. To do so, open the Settings app on each iPhone and iPad and go to Contacts. Here, if there is an Exchange account installed, it will likely appear as the Default Account. For me, I want this to be set to iCloud.
Keep in mind that later in this article we’ll configure Exchange to sync contacts with iCloud, so that Single Source of Truth could be Exchange – but given that we move jobs and sometimes have a different need in different years, maybe iCloud is the place we want to have our contacts.
Once done, test it by creating a new contact on the phone and making sure it shows up in the Contacts app as created.
Install Microsoft Outlook
If we’ve been saving contacts into Exchange then we’ll want them to make it back to iCloud. For this we’ll use a little feature in Microsoft Outlook for iOS that makes the process simple. Once installed and configure, open Microsoft Outlook and tap on your name in the upper left corner of the screen and then on the cog wheel meant for settings (at the bottom left of the screen that then opens. There, slide Save Contacts to the on position and wait.
If you have the Contacts app open (e.g. on a Mac), you’ll see the contacts from Exchange start showing up in the list. On the phone we can then create contacts in Outlook (see screenshots below) or in the Contacts app and they should still appear in Contacts on a Mac or on the iCloud website.
Once contacts have been sync’d Outlook can be removed from the device or can stay (I personally have grown fond of Outlook for iOS. Each will have an outlook-like URL at the bottom but the attributes of the vcf (e.g. phone number, birthday, etc) should flow in as they appeared in Outlook.
Delete and Merge Duplicates
Give the sync about a day to complete. Should take an hour at most, but according to how many devices are syncing over sometimes low bandwidth connections it’s best to just give things some time. The next day, let’s open up and look at our friends and colleagues in the Contacts app. Because some were likely created and attached to the SIM on a phone, others in iCloud, others in Outlook, and still others on the Mac there are likely going to be duplicates. Many of those might have the exact same information. Those can just quickly be deleted.
For the ones with different pieces of information, we might have some merging to do. For this, check out one of the following apps:
- Contacts Cleanup Lite: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/contacts-cleanup-lite/id985072904?mt=12
- Address Book Clearout: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/address-book-clearout/id442397431?mt=12
- Contacts Cleaner: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/contacts-cleaner/id411369012?mt=12
Note: This article has centered around Outlook/O365 users. For Google users, try: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/contactssync-sync-your-contacts-for-google-gmail/id980129840?mt=12.
Conclusion
There was a time when contacts were just problematic. As a young consultant, I lost customers because they got frustrated with the situation and yet I was never able to get them to stop using multiple apps to access contacts – often because there was no other good way. There are certainly still slight frustrations and a little manual work in getting things normal but for the first time in a long time I now have one contact per