Decent shared-contact solution for school?

[panjandrum]

Put this in the list of things that used to work OK and simply don't anymore in the Apple ecosystem:

I'm trying to find a decent, reasonably priced (or free) and reasonably-easy to setup and manage (think "GUI" not "CLI"), contact solution for sharing contacts between staff members. Back in the day (think Snow-Leopard era) this was fairly easy if a bit of a work-around since the Address Book server at the time didn't (and never did, as far as I know) support contact sharing between users. But I could set-up a single user, say "abuser" and simply setup every staff member to access that Address Book Server account and it worked OK. But users would sometimes delete the wrong contacts etc., and at some point we just gave up on it.

Years later we are in the "share everything with Google" era, but that's not really a great solution because Google won't sync groups with Apple's Contacts apps - otherwise I could just setup a "universal" Google user and more or less do it the way we used to do it, but using Google instead of macOS Server.

TLDR: Here is what we would, ideally, have: A single administrative assistant would maintain a read-only shared Contacts database, which would be shared to all other staff-members regardless of device, AND it needs to support GROUPS so that, for example, each classroom can be kept as a separate group. Read-only isn't absolutely necessary, but it would be really handy.

Anyone have some ideas for me?

Thanks!

 

[DJLC]

You could do this with a Google Sheet:

Create one main tab with all the contacts. As an example, the column titles might be: First, Last, Phone, Email, Group. You could use the Group column to sort them into groups. You could also create additional sheets and use the QUERY function to show contacts from a specific group on each sheet. Then, share that sheet with your staff as view-only.

 

[panjandrum]

You could do this with a Google Sheet:

Create one main tab with all the contacts. As an example, the column titles might be: First, Last, Phone, Email, Group. You could use the Group column to sort them into groups. You could also create additional sheets and use the QUERY function to show contacts from a specific group on each sheet. Then, share that sheet with your staff as view-only.

Yeah, but that wouldn't interact with the Contacts database in any way (unless I'm missing something in your explanation). We would have a contacts list, but it needs to integrate with Apple's Contacts so that it can propagate to Mail, etc.

 

[DJLC]

Yeah, but that wouldn't interact with the Contacts database in any way (unless I'm missing something in your explanation). We would have a contacts list, but it needs to integrate with Apple's Contacts so that it can propagate to Mail, etc.

Ah, so it wouldn't. Okay — what if you made a new shared Apple ID and used iCloud Contacts? You'd lose the read-only aspect, but you'd gain solid synced data across users and apps WITH groups. Looks like System Prefs will let you add an additional iCloud account / only enable Contacts.

 

[PhoenixDown]

I thought apple had enterprise/corporate software to deal with exactly that?

 

[BrianBaughn]

Easy and cheap method doesn't exist, I'm pretty sure. If you want to check out something complicated and "free" you can research Radicale.

Also, I don't know if it's possible or how easy it would be but there might be a way to make a standard contacts database rebuild itself every night (delete all contacts and import from master). Again, not that simple if even possible.

 

[panjandrum]

I thought apple had enterprise/corporate software to deal with exactly that?

Apple has been, since around the time of the release of Lion, slowly and steadily working to destroy their once excellent small-business and education ecosystem. Mac OS X Server used to (more or less, as mentioned above you still had to use a single account to actually have a true "shared contact" database) do what I want to do cheaply and easily, but they have removed (or soon will be) that functionality with the most recent version ( https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-death-of-macos-server/ ).
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Ah, so it wouldn't. Okay — what if you made a new shared Apple ID and used iCloud Contacts? You'd lose the read-only aspect, but you'd gain solid synced data across users and apps WITH groups. Looks like System Prefs will let you add an additional iCloud account / only enable Contacts.

Oh good grief, I can't believe I didn't think of that! That might just do what we want with very few issues. Come to think of it, that solution, combined with Synctastic, would even sync contacts with Groups properly with Google accounts if a staff member wished to do so.

Thanks!