Success Story: Shared Contacts for Gmail® and RJFNET

11:54 AM contact sharing , global directory , lotus notes , migration , shared contacts , success story 0 Comments

Shared Contacts for Gmail® is an application that allows users to share contacts and contact groups the same way they share Google Docs...With a button that says “Share” !

Just like with Google docs and Google Calendars, all invited users will see in real time the updated contacts in their shared address books, and will be able to update them as well.

The Customer RJF International Corporation is a customer-oriented manufacturer of engineered polymer products, for select specialty markets. RJF is a leader in the this industry, thanks to constant innovation and technical know-how. The 550 employees of RJC needed a solution that could help them to collaborate easily on the entire enterprise data. Google apps was the solution and Shared Contacts for Gmail® triggered the decision!

The Challenge

When RJF International Corporation decided to switch from Lotus Notes to Google apps, the whole staff had to acquire an innovative solution that proves to be simple and user friendly. The whole team wanted to improve their productivity and make substantial savings.

However, even if Google apps offered revolutionary tools for the organization, there was one missing feature that would be likely to compromise the migration: To share contacts.  A lot of corporation's users were sharing address books in Lotus notes and it was unacceptable for them to give up this functionality. Of course, Google apps offers the possibility to manage a central GAL (Global Address List), but this GAL is automatically shared with the whole company, and the access cannot be restricted to certain users. Moreover, the shared contacts of the 'Global Address List', does not appear in the Gmail Contact Manager. Therefore, it was impossible to really “collaborate” on shared contacts.

The Solution

After trying several applications from the Google Marketplace to share contacts,  RJF International Corporation selected Shared Contacts for Gmail® thanks to its stability, efficiency and the fact that it is easy to use.

Users can continue to manage their shared contacts directly from their Gmail Contact Manager, because no third party tool is required!

What did they say?

“Our benchmark of applications for sharing contacts naturally led us to choose Gmail Shared contacts” says Stacey McDonald (Manager of CRM Applications at RJC). “...Other applications we tried were either creating tons of duplicates and shared with all users in the domain which we did not want.  We wanted to control who had access to the shared contacts”

Stacey adds that the customer support was also excellent; "...we always had someone to chat with during the whole process and price was very fair. E-consulting (the application editor), was very open to discuss the cost that would fit our large amount of users and we came to an agreement that provided us an upmarket application for a very good price”.