Cannot add/edit company contacts

I have observed the same.

I have observed the same.

anyone else come across this?

the reason for this change was that CONNECT relies on the company directory. When they hit a real-world server (mine) where the contact directory was populated by entries without an extension (such as loading common called clients for click-to-calling ability) connect client would crash. They determined that they had to make the company directory exclusive to just user extensions. Now only user extension people can exist in the directory. To edit the entries that appear, it is done under user extensions for the Contact Info tab.

the personal contact directory for the user portal is unaffected I believe.

I think that is a failure major step backwards. We had several people that used the company directory for commonly called contacts company wide (as you had mentioned). We had scripts that loaded this directory on everyones phone automatically.

While I can see that CONNECT seems to be this massive new focus, in our user base of several thousand extensions, I expect less than 10% of those extensions would use connect or care more about the functionality of connect than what they are losing on their desk phones by not having the ability to have a centralized company directory.

I am actually probably going to have to roll back a client to 7.X based on this post knowing that a centralized company directory is not planning to be supported at this time. I was under the impression that this was just a temporary bug that needed to be fixed and have been inserting entries into the MySQL database directly for the customer while I was waiting for this to be fixed.

Thats unfortunate!

We do the same thing, although on a much smaller scale (multi tenant, maybe 40 customers) and have been doing it manually as well!

i have proposed fixes for this in the "features wanted" section, please review and add to the thread your thoughts so we can all get a working happy system out of this :)

[thread is here](https://www.thirdlane.com/forum/addedit-external-contacts)

Until they come up with an alternative, I would suggest creating a second table to put those entries if you are only using them to export a contact list for the phones themselves. If you have the polycom templates installed, or vtech, you will see the python scripts I made that create those contact lists for the phones. It would be rather trivial to append a second table to the output before closing out the XML at the end.

I tried playing with OpenLDAP aka Active Directory features of the polycom but quit when I realized that none of my contacts in Zimbra/Exchange were actually in the LDAP directory, only users, which is tantamount to the issue we currently have to suffer. Zimbra supports CardDAV, I wish the phones supported that directly. I may write something in python that can lookup the custom tag for the extension and look for a value key pair (i always store a whole string of key=value in there and parse them all out with scripts). Gleaning the value/key pairs to fetch the CardDAV data I could, in theory, parse out a more fulfilling contact list.

see this is why I love python... 10 seconds of googling 'python carddav' I discover someone already wrote a module to interact.

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyCardDAV/

Erik,

Why could Thirdlane software not use your company directory "alternative" for its implementation of Connect as opposed to disabling the company directory feature and require customers to "hack" the system themselves.

In other words, instead of a customer hacking the system with a second table for external contacts that the customer would then be on their own to implement a way to manage those contacts, why couldn't Thirdlane implement and use a second table that only contains extensions in a "Thirdlane Connect Directory" and reenable the company directory functionality of Thirdlane? Or why couldn't Thirdlane fix the company directory features of the portal by using a union of 2 tables as you are suggesting we hack on our own.

Basically, it seems like there were easy alternatives available to not need to have this functionality removed.

Thirdlane general principal is to maintain backward compatibility as much as it possible. Not having elastic resources we also do our best to determine what is important for the majority of our customers and focus on that.

Ability to manage company contacts was just a convenience feature, not meant to replace other directories for a company. While I understand that removal of this feature caused some inconvenience, it took 2 years for the problem to be "discovered" - so i would argue that this was not the most popular feature at all.

That said, we will look into what can be done.

Alex,

I don't know why you think it took 2 years for it to be noticed. Company contacts worked in release 7.5.2.1 which was the most current release 5 months ago.