Turtle Partnership Blog :: Sync a shared Company Address book or CRM with your BlackBerrys

04/10/2008

Many enterprises want to sync a shared Company Address book or CRM with their BlackBerrys. The problem is that the BlackBerry's address book syncs just with the user's personal address book, and it is inconvenient to try and integrate a personal address book with a shared Company Address book.

So we have put together a Shared Contacts app to provide a simple solution when you want to sync a shared company address book or CRM with your BlackBerrys. And its free. And available right now on our website

The main idea is to provide an easy-to-use application to run on the BlackBerry which would let BB users search their Company Address book for contacts, make calls and send emails, in the same way as they do within their own Address Book.

The flip side of this is to make it easy to add the push technology to any Domino address book or application. To help we built a sample Notes Database with some simple contacts forms and views, along with the scripts and agents to handle the pushing of contacts data out to the BlackBerrys. The database contains instructions in its 'Using This Database' on how to integrate the push components into any database.

We think the whole solution is nice and simple, but can easily be extended in many directions.

The Contacts application can be downloaded to your BlackBerry here: http://lotusphere.turtleweb.com/contacts.jad

The Notes Database can be downloaded here: http://lotusphere.turtleweb.com/bbcontacts.zip

Full setup instructions can be found in the 'Using This Database' document.

This is the first iteration of the application and we are already working on the next version. This will have a pseudo-replication model, where it maintains a 'replication history' for each BlackBerry and sends down only changes.

(P.S. Tim has also put a more technical post over on www.notesberry.org )

Mike Smith | London | TrackBacks (0) | Comments (7)

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Comments

1 - Hey Mike, great application! I think it's one of the first thing one looks for when using the Blackberry.

I quickly tried to add it to our existing CRM app in Lotus Notes (following the instructions in the Using Db) but I got a couple of errors when clicking in the Push Config button in the config form (after I filled the data and saved the document)

buildConfigDataError: Object variable not set in line 2
pushData Error: Object variable not set in line 2

I'll check, it might be me rushing through this.

Best regards,

Cesar.

Posted by Cesar Zavala At 09:59:17 PM On 04/10/2008 | - Website - |

2 - Line 2 doesn't sound good ! If that doesn't go away feel free to email it some more details and we'll take a look at it. Email to support-at-turtleweb-dot-com

Posted by Gab Davis At 10:56:40 PM On 04/10/2008 | - Website - |

3 - Just to say that Tim also put a longer technical post about this app over on notesberry.

You can see it here:

{ Link }

Mike

Posted by Mike Smith At 02:30:55 PM On 04/11/2008 | - Website - |

4 - Following up from Cesar's comment: I forgot to list the Config view as an element needing to be copied into your own db. I have amended the instructions in the 'Using This Database' and put an updated db on our download site. (Thanks for helping us out on this, Cesar).

Posted by Tim Davis At 08:04:32 AM On 04/14/2008 | - Website - |

5 - A couple of people have pointed out the need to sign the database with the server id to make sure the agents run OK. I'll add that to the instructions, too.

Posted by Tim Davis At 12:03:13 PM On 04/15/2008 | - Website - |

6 - Cool application, just one request, can you add a field to add the PIN number, and of course a drop down so you can PIN someone from the contact Emoticon

Thanks a lot for your efforts.

Posted by Richard Sun At 01:32:18 PM On 04/15/2008 | - Website - |

7 - very nice app. our CRM has some 11000 contacts. After the Blackberry updated them all night, it only displays the last 300 or so. Is there a limit to the number of contacts allowed?

Posted by Kurt At 12:57:42 PM On 10/29/2008 | - Website - |