Centralised contacts for Mobile Phones

[tobiasclarity]

Hi All,

 

I am looking for a stable centralised solution we can maintain the schools phone contacts across the schools mobile phones. This is the one thing i have never fully resolved and am currently using contacts on an old Mac server and porting them through via MDM to the mobiles. Issue with this is that you cant set it as read only so if someone changes a contact on their mobile phone it changes it for every mobile phone across site and equally if they manage to add a contact to the schools phone list it replicates to everyone's phones also.

 

Any recommendations or work-arounds would be appreciated, i cant believe i am the only school here needing to have a set contacts list on multiple mobile phones but the last time i spent a long time looking into this and solutions i gained zero traction

 

Cheers

[LukeMoss]

Which MDM are you using? I haven't done it myself, but I've had a quick look on Lightspeed and you can configure the access to the CardDAV server on the Mac server and then apply the settings. It says "Use this section to configure access to CardDAV servers. (Users will not be able to modify these settings on their devices once the configuration profile is installed)" I'm not sure whether this would work as I haven't tried it myself, but it reads as if it's read only.

 

Edit: Thinking about it and looking at some other settings it looks more like you can't edit the settings not the actual contacts list.

Edited November 20, 2019 by LukeMoss
Added information

[tobiasclarity]

Bump for any further feedback

[Mark182]

We currently use this - Users have their own local phone book and then use that app for school contacts. It works well and is free. We are looking to move and integrate into intune but are running into issues similar to you.

[tobiasclarity]

We currently use this - Users have their own local phone book and then use that app for school contacts. It works well and is free. We are looking to move and integrate into intune but are running into issues similar to you.

 

Thank you, couple of questions if i may:

 

Can this be a read only environment so they cant make any changes

Does it show the person calling them if the contact is within this app and not native to the phone

[tobiasclarity]

Another bump

[Poults]

If you addd a phone number to the contact info in Active Directory and set the Exchange contacts to sync, I dont think it displays in contacts but if you search for the user you can get to the phone number (Assuming you are using Windows and Exchange).

[tobiasclarity]

If you addd a phone number to the contact info in Active Directory and set the Exchange contacts to sync, I dont think it displays in contacts but if you search for the user you can get to the phone number (Assuming you are using Windows and Exchange).

Hi, Thank you, i have had a look at this but unfortunately doesn't fully fulfill our requirements in that it will show the user when they are calling the phone etc

 

This is a really tough one and trivial at that! i cant believe we are the only school looking for a solution to this issue. Of course the main option is to manually input a contacts database onto each phone but we have a lot of phones and it makes it a nightmare should there be any changes to be made.