Best way to push contact list (vCard) to iPhones....

You could put a Web Clip in self service that links to a vcard with all the contacts

John,
What did you discover? Any elegant solution? I also thought about the self-service web link option but then you would need to ask the end users to de-duplicate their lists. Right?

@dtrockman

What's up.. We wound up using a gmail account (non Corporate account). But it was less than ideal... a pop up would constantly come up saying login, or enter password.

So I am looking to the Vcard / WebClip thing, but I cannot figure out how to upload the Vcard, in House App?

I am not sure about the Contacts duplicating, that could happen, but hopefully not. I would like to set this up as a Vcard / WebClip and see for myself what happens.

Any help, greatly appreciated.

thx, John

In the end, our course will be to skip any jamf involvement. We'll add the user to the gSuite directory and then direct users to click on the Google "group" that appears in Contacts app in iOS. Users are able to search for the new employee and add a contact from the options list. This eliminates duplicates and the sharing of a contact vCard by email across the enterprise.

@dtrockman

Sounds like a great idea... we can try it as well.

thx, john

how did the vCard web clip work out for you?

So I was tasked with sending out a managed contacts list to our different dept.s and this was how I did it- created an account for each contact list named by dept like this- contacts.teachers@......... then set up in JAMF. This works fine as we then log into the account and update as needed. The end user can also still add their own contacts to the phone without messing up our managed list. NOTE: when applied the first time works like a charm, however, if you edit the profile and resend, it asks for a PW. Also, the config profile on the device needs permissions to change settings- this is a problem if you are using JAMF reset/setup as these profiles have this option turned off. HINT: move the device out of scope and back in to get past the password issue. Also, I scoped the contacts app bundle to be used with this account.

We use O365 in our school district and ended up building a carddav server. The various contact lists are then connected to the users outlook accounts.

A client ended up using the GAL function and educating users how to access it from Outlook on iOS.

Do you have any articles or guides on how to do that?

Hey John, 

I know your problem very well from many IT projects – especially when it comes to pushing contact lists to iPhones. This is a problem many businesses face and struggle with. 

One approach that works well for many organizations is to synchronize your contacts using a smart contact synchronization like sync.blue®. Sync.blue® syncs contact lists – also via an MDM – directly to the iPhone's native contact book. 

There are many ways to synchronize contacts via sync.blue® but I guess the right solution for you would be a CardDAV server hosted by sync.blue®, that regularly synchronizes contacts from your Outlook contact list to the iPhones native contact books. Besides that, we also offer contact synchronization from the Exchange contact list without needing to install further applications and much more. 

If you want to try our simple contact management, feel free to try for free here and reach out to us if you have any further questions. 

Best Regards 

Johannis from the sync.blue® team