I currently have Google Apps managing my domain's mail, contacts, and calendars. An important reason that we chose Google Apps was because of contact sync. We are a small business and need to share important customer contact information between ourselves.
Unfortunately I was mislead by Google Apps technical support, Google's own online documentation, and other blog posts and forums about Google Contact Sync to think that it was able to sync all of your Contacts. It doesn't, and I'm scrambling to find a solution.
I have explored all the services that I could find, but they aren't cheap or increase complexity:
- Soocial - For $40 a year it can sync multiple Google accounts' contacts. Its cheap and does solve our problem. However there is no integration with Google Apps, so each new user requires a bit more setup. This isn't good since my boss isn't very technical and I'm not going to be around all the time or the future to do it for him. It can also be slow: For a new contact to reach one iPhone to another takes iPhone > Google Contacts > Soocial > Other Google Contacts > iPhone. Doesn't seem like a fast process there
- Sherpa Tools - This was actually recommended by the Google tech. On the outside it looks perfect: Has a global contact list and is free. Unfortunately it seems to require you to create it in the Sherpa Tools interface, not anywhere else. It is also quite slow: A test contact I created 45 minutes ago still isn't showing up in any of my user's contact lists.
- floreysoft - Another Google App Engine product, this also integrates with Google Apps. Unfortunately its expensive; the edition I would need costs $200 a year, which is more than I pay Google for my 3 users
None of these services offer a really good scenario. Is there any other tool I'm missing that can sync all the contact lists of every user in a Google Apps domain easily and cheaply?