So android seems to have this inherent limitation with respect to Groups. i.e. in order to set a group ringtone, or have my groups displayed in Launcher Pro widgets, I need to make a contact on the Phone, assign this Phone contact as part of a group, and then link the Phone contact to an existing contact (Gmail, corporate, etc.).
This works but it is a pain in the neck to update to new ROMs as there is no easy way that I know of to backup and restore this information. I tried an export of my contacts before flashing and the export went fine. However, this forced me to export ALL of my contacts including the GMAIL and corporate ones. When I imported the contacts (after upgrading ROM), I imported them all to the PHONE which created duplicate entries for all the GMAIL and corporate contacts that got re-synched.
Does anyone know of a better solution for backing up and restoring only the PHONE contacts and groups? If there is no good solution, is there enough interest to justify development of an app to do this?
I finally got a Windows Phone 7.
However my first gripe was the fact that when you use your live ID, it automatically decides to import all your contacts from MSN etc which is kind of stupid. So I ended up fixing that by creating a new account just for my phone.
Microsoft really need to add an option there, Do not sync live contacts!
As I handle all this through my Exchange service. Only use my live account for MSN.
Anyway so I decided to link my facebook account to my phone. That went great right up until I saw it importing all my facebook contacts! So I finally found the setting to only sync with contacts in phone, so now it's linked my phone contacts to my facebook by only whats on my phone.
However this is where I have an issue. I go to type a text message or email and look for a contact and it's showing ALL my contacts from facebook, yet they don't show in the People Hub. I specifically have the setting "Only add facebook information to existing contacts" checked.
My next issue is the fact Birthdays from Exchange to the Phone are not syncing up correctly.
Some will sync up correctly and others will be out.
The information is there on the Exchange and correct, and same in my Outlook. But WP7 sometimes decides that a contacts birthday will be out by a day. So far one day ahead.
E.G
Contact 1 Birthday 16th July on exchange, shows up as 17th July
They are also not appearing in the calendar
I have checked and regional settings on phone and exchange are correct. It can't be the exchange as it was syncing fine with WM 6.1.
Help!!!!
actually the birthday issue has been there since wm6.5 for me and still a mystery to me hehe.
danbriant said:
I finally got a Windows Phone 7.
However my first gripe was the fact that when you use your live ID, it automatically decides to import all your contacts from MSN etc which is kind of stupid. So I ended up fixing that by creating a new account just for my phone.
Microsoft really need to add an option there, Do not sync live contacts!
As I handle all this through my Exchange service. Only use my live account for MSN.
Anyway so I decided to link my facebook account to my phone. That went great right up until I saw it importing all my facebook contacts! So I finally found the setting to only sync with contacts in phone, so now it's linked my phone contacts to my facebook by only whats on my phone.
However this is where I have an issue. I go to type a text message or email and look for a contact and it's showing ALL my contacts from facebook, yet they don't show in the People Hub. I specifically have the setting "Only add facebook information to existing contacts" checked.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It automatically decides to import it because that was the way the phone was designed. To stay in sync with your Windows Live Hotmail, Contacts, Calendar, Xbox, Zune, etc. Certain things can be disabled for the most part, but the phone was designed to take these things from the cloud and put em on your phone. The phone was built for those who primarily use Windows Live and it's services. Just like how Android phones are built for those who use Google services.
As for your Facebook contacts, they will continue to display in your messaging/mail auto-complete regardless of the setting you choose in the People hub. That setting simply hides them from view in the People hub, it does not remove them from your phone. You can still do a People search and find Facebook contacts (and other services if you have them sync'd), and when you compose a new sms/email, you can still use auto-complete to find a Facebook contact. Just because you don't have them as a specific contact in your address book does not mean you will not contact them ever, and so the phone surfaces that information in the case you ever need to. You simply have to ignore the other contacts, and continue on your normal contacts.
prjkthack said:
It automatically decides to import it because that was the way the phone was designed. To stay in sync with your Windows Live Hotmail, Contacts, Calendar, Xbox, Zune, etc. Certain things can be disabled for the most part, but the phone was designed to take these things from the cloud and put em on your phone. The phone was built for those who primarily use Windows Live and it's services. Just like how Android phones are built for those who use Google services.
As for your Facebook contacts, they will continue to display in your messaging/mail auto-complete regardless of the setting you choose in the People hub. That setting simply hides them from view in the People hub, it does not remove them from your phone. You can still do a People search and find Facebook contacts (and other services if you have them sync'd), and when you compose a new sms/email, you can still use auto-complete to find a Facebook contact. Just because you don't have them as a specific contact in your address book does not mean you will not contact them ever, and so the phone surfaces that information in the case you ever need to. You simply have to ignore the other contacts, and continue on your normal contacts.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That is really stupid. I choose to not show them for a reason as I don't want hundreds of contacts in my contacts list for messages and emails.
Does Mango solve this issue?
Also I'm guessing there's no way to choose what info gets imported for each contact, as some contacts on facebook input invalid phone numbers etc and well they are now clogging up my phone with useless info.
Kind of stupid to not have options to control what can and cant be linked and displayed!
prjkthack said:
It automatically decides to import it because that was the way the phone was designed. To stay in sync with your Windows Live Hotmail, Contacts, Calendar, Xbox, Zune, etc. Certain things can be disabled for the most part, but the phone was designed to take these things from the cloud and put em on your phone. The phone was built for those who primarily use Windows Live and it's services. Just like how Android phones are built for those who use Google services.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Android does at least give you the option to disable syncing contacts with google though.
danbriant said:
That is really stupid. I choose to not show them for a reason as I don't want hundreds of contacts in my contacts list for messages and emails.
Does Mango solve this issue?
Also I'm guessing there's no way to choose what info gets imported for each contact, as some contacts on facebook input invalid phone numbers etc and well they are now clogging up my phone with useless info.
Kind of stupid to not have options to control what can and cant be linked and displayed!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Guess that all depends on how you look at it. I filter my People list to ones only in my Hotmail contacts, sync Facebook info with those only in my People list, and enjoy it when the messaging app allows me the flexibility to still contact those who have contact information but are not displayed in my People list. Again Windows Phone 7 is a socially connected phone designed to help keep you in contact with your Windows Live and Facebook contacts in addition to your regular phone book contacts (and just wait till Twitter and LinkedIn are finally available). So if you don't like that, then the phone is probably not for you.
Mango does not solve the "issue" since its by design, and therefore not an issue at all. I don't expect to it change anytime soon either since Facebook Chat is also integrated and the phone won't simply just exclude the people in Facebook Chat who don't exist on your phone, as that destroys the convenience of chat.
Just gonna be something you need to deal with I suppose, until the feature to further filter your contacts can be added.
Hello,
I added (synced) Skype, GMail and LinkedIn contacts with my phone book and I see that sometime Android is triggering the linked contacts suggestion and propose to link (for instance) a Skype contact with a phone book contact.
Is it possible to trigger this process by hand? I hate to define these links every time by hand.
This triggers when you add an account and it syncs for the first time. No other way to do it.
I only added links to my contacts once. Then, i backed them up to google. Now, when i restore contacts (to a Sense ROM) they automatically link, no notification links required.
Thank you for this information.
I asked this, because actually it shouldn't be necessary to link contacts more than once, even if I had this necessity. I can explain why.
I have:
1) 1 account on Funambol (my main phone book)
2) 2 gmail accounts
3) 1 LinkedIn account
4) 2 Twitter accounts
5) 1 Skype account
All of these accounts are set to be synced with my phone.
What happened: when I added the Skype Account, I decided to sync all contacts with my device. So I found all my Skype contacts in the phone book. Then, the contact connections suggestion has been triggered after a non precise period of time and I linked the contacts as usual. Then I removed a Skype contact from my PC. After doing that, I went into Settings->Account&Sync->Skype->Sync contacts but the contact I removed on my PC didn't go away from my phone book on the device.
I also noticed that the sync process was too much short (~0,1 seconds), and it couldn't be gone all OK as actually was.
So I decided to go into Skype settings and change the sync options to Sync with existing contacts; then the contact I removed using the PC has gone away from the phone too, and then I reset the sync setting to Sync all (first option).
This caused all my Skype contacts to be unlinked from my phone book (Funambol) contacts and the link contact suggestion has been triggered again after some time. Despite that, I had to re link many of my Skype contact by hand and you can understand that it is not so happy.
I didn't understand where the contact connections are stored. You say google account, but I'm not convinced of that. At least in my case. I've seen that after linking contacts, the funambol client had something to sync with the server but I don't know what it did exactly. By the way, I didn't understand why, the phone numbers I've put into the funambol account are not going to be stored also in the gmail account, where the contacts are linked together.
Apologies if this exists and I can't find it, but I would like to be able to sync one or more Google contacts groups between accounts.
For example, my wife and I both have a "family" contacts group. I would like to sync her family contacts with mine so that we both have identical contact lists and any changes made by one of us is propagated to the other's contacts.
I don't want to sync all my contacts because she has no need to see my work contacts and vice-versa. This could also be useful among co-workers or other groups.
I know I can do this manually with export and import, but it's time consuming, a pain to work out all the duplicates, and doesn't account for changes. There are also solutions for Google apps users, but I'm not one.
This wouldn't have to be an android app, but it could be. The Google contacts API seems to have all the necessary calls. If the contact information was stored in a shared location (Google drive?), each person wouldn't need access to the other's account, just to the exported group data.
For configuration, you would:
Grant access to your Google contacts,
Choose which of your groups you want to share and where the shared export files would be located.
Choose which of the other user's files in the shared location you want to sync.
Choose how often to sync.
The app could:
Run once on boot, or perhaps daily and manually.
Export shared groups file to a shared location (Google Drive). Could be called <username>.<group_name>.csv
Look for other shared groups in shared location. If the exist, compare them. If there are differences, attempt to sync and re-export. Also generate notification if there was a sync attempt to allow user to review changes.
How do people have their contacts when using multiple Google accounts?
I email people from work using work and personal accounts, depending on the content so I want my contacts available on both
It seems most contact merging apps only address duplicate contacts but not contacts that are present in more than one account.
That is they consolidate multiple contacts into one but they do not "join" the contacts
Presently I have so many contacts and each contact had so many joins that my note 3 suffers when browsing contacts.
I also don't understand why Google and Google plus contacts are separate.
Some of my contacts have the maximum Ten joins and I need more, so clearly in not doing things the way Google intended.
Options: use a third party service to keep multiple accounts in sync, but only sync one to the phone.
Find a utility which can join (not just merge) contacts automatically
Also, my contact pictures keep disappearing. Not all of them, but some.
Can anyone explain how social networking contact syncing works when using the social network syncing versus using something like contacts plus and connecting it to Facebook?
I've been having a hell of a time trying to understand the philosophy behind Android contacts but I've not been able to make sense of how they were actually intended to be used. It seems totally haphazard