In case you didn’t know yet, SaaS management platform BetterCloud announced they are discontinuing their contact sharing features.
The reason is that as of January 1st, 2022, Google will discontinue the support for their old contact sharing API, and BetterCloud is not upgrading to their new API.
These things happen — but it means that if you’ve previously used BetterCloud for your Google contact sharing, you’re now faced with a problem.
In this article, we’ll offer you an alternative to BetterCloud and we’ll go through the steps you need to take to ensure you can continue smooth contact sharing and management at your organization after this change.
Read more: What is contact sharing and why is it important
What Exactly Will Happen?
BetterCloud decided to focus on its core business of being a SaaS management tool for admins to automate technical tasks and manage the security of their users’ data.
A lot of users have been using the tool for contact management and sharing only in the past, but as mentioned above, this won’t be an option soon.
In practice, as of January 1st, 2022 organizations using BetterCloud will see the following restrictions:
- Their Google domain admin will not be able to add new contacts into shared labels
- Users with edit access will not be able to add or update the contacts anymore through Bettercloud
- Contact information will not be accessible on mobile devices
- Nobody will be able to create new shared contacts
- The different permissions (View Only, Can Edit) will not work anymore
The simple result is that your organization will quickly end up with a contact base that will not evolve, and a lot of the data will be outdated soon.
The contact sharing feature will stop working, and when someone on your team updates one shared contact, the changes will not be synchronized with other users and you’re back to updating every single contact manually.
In this article, we will show you how to smoothly transition from Bettercloud to Shared Contacts for Gmail® in order to keep a centralized and secure contact base.
Read more: The Short Guide to Contact Management
What Will Change With Shared Contacts for Gmail®?
This chart gives a better understanding of the improvements in your contact management practice after transitioning from Bettercloud to Shared Contacts for Gmail® :
BetterCloud / Shared Contacts for Gmail® comparison chart
| BetterCloud | Shared contacts for Gmail® | |
| Web Dashboard | YES | YES |
| Synchronization to Google Contacts labels | Every 48 hours | Immediate |
| Name of the groups of contacts | “Tags” | “Labels” or “Contact Lists” |
| Granular permissions (View Only, Can Edit, Can Delete, Can Share) | YES | YES |
| Synchronization from Google Contacts (for authorized users) | NO | Immediate (with Chrome) else, 3 times per hour |
| Auto-Merge of duplicate contacts | NO | YES |
| Sharing with Users and Google Groups | NO | YES |
| Sharing with other domain users and Gmail users | NO | YES |
| Comment & mentions colleagues in Contacts | NO | YES |
| Manage shared contacts from Android devices | NO | YES |
| Manage shared contacts from iOs devices | NO | YES |
| Manage shared contacts from Gmail | NO | YES |
| Manage shared contacts from Google Drive | NO | YES |
| Unlimited Contacts backup | NO | YES |
| Licensing System | For the whole Google domain | Per user |
What Do You Need to Do?
In short, what will happen is that the labels that appear as shared now in BetterCloud will not be shared anymore, which will make the information on the contacts outdated soon.
If you want to continue sharing contacts with your entire team, the people you chose to manage your shared contacts will need to reshare them in Shared Contacts for Gmail® with all the same users they were shared with before.
If you have a large number of users or labels, we recommend you read this article to make your task easy as pie.
After sharing the contact labels through Shared Contacts for Gmail®, you will still see the “Bettercloud” original labels.
To remove these duplicates, just log on BetterCloud and “unshare” them all, meaning remove all users’ access through BetterCloud and delete these labels as follow:
How to Migrate From BetterCloud to Shared Contacts for Gmail in a Few Clicks
Our team can operate the migration for you free of charge. If you want to implement the transition yourself, just read this guide or follow the steps below:
Time needed: 2 minutes.
To migrate your shared contacts from BetterCloud to Shared Contacts for Gmail®, just follow these little steps:
- Sign in on Shared Contacts for Gmail® dashboard
Click on “Sign in with Google” link.
- Select your shared labels and click on “share”
You can share labels individually by clicking on the blue icon or select multiple labels at once. The labels are the equivallent of “tags” in BetterCloud.
- Add the collaborators who need to see these contacts
We recommend to first adding the “viewers”, i.e. the ones who will be able to only view the shared contacts.
- Congratulations! Your BetterCloud tags are shared again.
They are now synchronized in real-time with your Google Contacts labels.
Note that this operation must be performed before January 1st 2022, otherwise this “unsharing” process will not work.
In any case, you can always contact us to help you migrate from BetterCloud smoothly.
Another technique (to avoid duplicate labels) is the following:
- First, unshare all the existing labels that used to be shared in BetterCloud.
- Once this is done, share them again with Shared Contacts for Gmail® as shown above
This is relatively straightforward, but it becomes a bigger task if your organization has a large number of labels to unshare and reshare with a large number of users.
If this process seems too complex or time-consuming for you, we at Shared Contacts for Gmail® can help you with it.
Our support is here to make your transition as smooth as possible.
We Can Help You Reassess Your Whole Contact Management System
While BetterCloud is way more than a contact-sharing tool, Shared Contacts for Gmail® is a cloud-based interface designed for contact sharing and management, so it’s simple to use and helps you streamline all your contact management processes.
While we help you transition from BetterCloud, we can also help you to optimize your contact management practices and make the most of your new contact management tool by going through your processes and making sure everything is in check.
With Shared Contacts for Gmail®, you get:
- A clear understanding of the contacts in your organization and an easy way to manage them
- A system that brings shared contacts and contact sharing to the fingertips of your users, wherever they are (the shared contacts will follow them in Gmail, Drive, their mobile phones, Whatsapp, their CRM and hundreds of other integrated apps)
- A very intuitive tool that is designed specifically to streamline your contact management process
- A system that allows for improved cross-team collaboration and productivity
We offer coaching and support tailored specifically to your team’s and organization’s contact management needs, and we will guide you through the transition, step by step.
If you’re interested, you can contact us today to discover more about how we can help your team make contact management and sharing easy again.
- How to Migrate Contacts from BetterCloud to Shared Contacts
- Google Contacts API Deprecation, BetterCloud, and Shared Contacts
- BetterCloud support announcement of Contact Sharing Feature discontinuation
- Google Announcement of Google Contacts API deprecation
- Shared Contacts features for Google Workspace and G Suite domains
