Gmail Shared Contacts

Continuing my quest for life in the cloud, I wanted to be able to share selected contacts with my wife. Remember that I have my private domain hosted by Google Apps.

The first solution was Apptivo but it was "bigger than a breadbox" (showing my age). I never did get it fully implemented as it was moderately complex. The upside is that it is free and you can sync contacts for 10 users with a 30 minute sync time. Here's their pricing. But it's messy. I never hooked my wife's account into it.

So I kept looking for something simpler.

I found Gmail Shared Contacts. The user side implementation is much simpler. Basically the domain administrator designates a contact group as shared and that's it. You can share 1 contact group with 25 or less contacts among unlimited users. Here's their pricing. The sync time is 1 hour. That's plenty for what I need.

The downside is that the application seems to be in transition. It has taken me over 6 weeks to finally get it working. The support is via e-mail from France but they are responsive and helpful. I'm hopeful that Gmail Shared Contacts settles down.

Both of these require the domain administrator to install a Google Marketplace App. Then you have a slight customization.