Sync GAL from Exchange

[tsmithpoulsen]

Hi,

Does any of you have a solution to synchronize all contacts from Active Directory and keeping them updated?
While searching for a solution, I came across a post that suggested to have a shared Exchange account that would have all contacts stored, and add that as an extra account on all iOS devices.

Is it possible to tell an Exchange profile to only sync contacts? If not, this is not an ideal solution in our case.
Any ideas?

[john_bio]

It's not possible out of the box. (Exchange does not support this)

There are a few commerical solutions that do this but they are very expensive.

I've written my own solution that works perfectly that involves some custom scripts which pull all the records I want from AD (actually multiple domains, ours and our parent companies), converts each AD record into a vcf vCard which then get picked up by some more scripts and push them into a custom built CardDAV server that I've written my self . The whole thing is now nicely rolled up into a single docker container that ive deployed into our docker environment.

Then with the JSS we've got a configuration profile that points to that server for a CardDAV account and is pushed out to all OS X and iOS devices.

Works very nice but was a lot of work. It's great for when someone in our large company calls another mobile you get the name and full screen photo of them appear on on the devices incoming call screen which gives you a nice indication of who's calling :)