Customer Case

Lubavitch Educational Center (LECFL)

Shared Contacts for Gmail® helped us to successfully integrate Google Workplace and Google Voice. Now, whenever a student or a parent is calling any teacher, the caller and details of the person appears as soon as the phone rings!

LECFL Integration with Shared Contacts for Gmail
1400
Employees
487
Mobile devices
234000
Shared contacts
13500
Saved work hours
The Customer

The Lubavitch Educational Center LECFL is a school with classes ranging from preschool to high school located in Miami, Florida. The organization uses Google for Education and takes advantage of Google Voice to assign and collect homework.

The Challenge

01

When RJF International Corporation decided to make the move from Microsoft Exchange to Google Workspace, the whole staff was excited to switch to an innovative solution that proves to be as simple and user friendly as the tools people use at home. It was also generating a real gain of productivity and substantial savings. However, even if Google Workspace was proposing them a suite of top notch productivity tools, one missing feature was likely to compromise a swift migration: The shared contacts. There was no such thing as sharing Google Contacts!

02

A lot of their users were sharing address-books in Outlook / Microsoft Exchange and it was unacceptable for them to give up this functionality. Of course, Google Workspace offers the possibility to manage a central GAL (Global Address List), but this GAL is automatically shared with the whole company, and we cannot restrict its access to some users. Moreover, the shared contacts of the Google domain Global Address List do not appear in the Gmail Contact Manager or in the users’ mobile devices, users have to search them and cannot modify them. It was therefore impossible to really “collaborate” on shared contacts.

The Solution

After trying several applications in the Google Marketplace to share contacts, RJF International Corporation selected Shared Contacts for Gmail® thanks to its stability, its efficiency and the fact that it was easy to use. Moreover, data privacy and security was also a concern, and Shared Contacts for Gmail® team responded to all our watch points in a satisfactory manner. What made the change very easy, is that users continued using their existing Google user-interfaces (Google Contacts, Gmail, their Android or iPhone address books) to manage shared contacts. The app comes with a third-party user interface, but the users can choose not to use it and enjoy the full benefits of the app! The sharing interface provides the same user experience as the “share” feature of Google Drive / Google Docs and the contacts are quickly synchronised between users and company iPhones, iPads, email softwares (like Outlook or Thunderbird) and hundreds of integrated apps (Whatsapp, Ring Central etc.)

Our benchmark of applications for sharing contacts naturally led us to choose Shared Contacts for Gmail®. We could never have had the full engagement of our staff without it.

STACEY MCDONALD, MANAGER OF CRM APPLICATIONS
13500
Saved work hours