Follow Up: Exchange / Outlook Nickname (NK2) contacts syncing to iPhone

OK, so in my last blog posted I talked about an annoying problem with setting up contacts with the iPhone and Exchange 2010 and while the work around I posted hid a lot of unnecessary contacts they are still actually on the device. This causes a problem for a lot of my mobile users as a number of them sync their contacts via blue tooth with their in car systems.

The first time I had one of them do this they reported that they had 1000+ contacts listed on their in car system.

A previous work around I had used for the BlackBerry was to move all the contacts to a secondary address book and then have them store only telephone numbers in their main 'Contacts' address book within Outlook. On the iPhone this doesn't work.

So here's how I solved this problem (or at least this is my work around)

Within Outlook export all the contacts from the address book to a CSV file.

Go to GMail and import the CSV

From GMail export the contacts to a vCard format.

Go to iCloud and import the vCard

Now setup your iPhone to only sync contacts from iCloud and not Exchange.

Seems a little messy really, Apple should really come up with a fix for this, as when my users add new contacts they will need to do it via the device/iCloud and then also in Outlook.

Exchange / Outlook Nickname (NK2) contacts syncing to iPhone

So I'm fairly new to iPhone (having had a BlackBerry for 4 years). Since setting my iPhone 5 to sync contacts, email etc with Exchange 2010 I've had a rather annoying issue, it seems that the iPhone picks up the "Suggested Contacts" folder, this means that my iPhone now has a contact for every single person that I've ever send an email to.

I read a couple of articles which suggest the way to fix the issue is to disable the suggest contacts, for me this would work fine, however the majority of my users use the suggested contacts. The solution is actually rather simple.

On the iPhone go to Contacts
Go to Groups
Check all the address books that you don't want to sync.

GMail Update

So I've been using GMail for a little under a month now and I am still very impressed. I am still unsure how it would fit into a larger organisation (with 10+ seats) there are 2 things I dislike about it at the moment.

Firstly there's the username issue, I finally managed to get my username straightened out and in fairness I may have been partly to blame. I had assigned my required forename.surname as an alias to my current account, so I was unable to rename until I removed this alias - so after waiting the required 5 (or was it 7 days? I actually waited 14) I finally started to rage at Google, hammering my keyboard with search terms until I finally gave up and decided to mess around with my account settings the error message in a round-about way lead me to believe removing the alias would work, and it did!

Secondly I don't like how the username you sign into email with follows you across all of Googles sites. Now for most people this isn't a problem and its actually benefits them but for me it doesn't. For my personal business I have my own domain and therefore use that for all my email, I have a separate signon for Blogger and for YouTube (although I think I somehow ended up managing to link the Blogger and YouTube accounts)

It's not really a problem, but it is an annoyance.

GMail

I’ve run into this problem before and it serves are reminder of how anal Google can be at times. Internet at my home as gone down (BT line problem) as a result I have no email as everything was coming into an Exchange box in my attic. I’ve now decided to shift my email over to Google.

The Google Apps for Business (http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html) is an excellent bit of software, it really is. The migration wizard (step by step guide) explained things and provide further information if needed. I’d say within about 5 minutes I was up and running, now this may have been where I went astray. Google only allows a username to be created once (and it ignores . [full stops], so forenamesurname and forename.surname are the same) Having signed in at admin and created 2 new (additional users) I started to look at how much this would cost, a reasonable £2.75 per user per month (if signing up for 12 months [£33]) however Google wants me to pay for 3 accounts! Administrator and my 2 users, so I promptly set about deleting myself and trying to rename the admin, however as I’d already created a user (even though I deleted) I am now unable to sign in with forename.surname@domain, very annoying. What solution do Google offer to this? Adding forename.surname as a nickname (alias) to the admin account, this is just stupid. I tried it and also fiddled around with the reply-to address, but it still always shows as admin@domain

The only possible saving grace in this is that I think the username may become available again after 5 days... it still seems farcical that I only made the username 5 minutes ago but I now have to wait 5 days in order to reclaim it  (very annoying considering I own the domain name)