Feature Incorporated: Crew Manager Crew Roster appears in smartphone contact list

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dancorcoran
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Feature Incorporated: Crew Manager Crew Roster appears in smartphone contact list

Post by dancorcoran »

Responding to a request for features, I have this one for you:

Rather than having to enter telephone numbers of crew twice, once into crew-manager and once into my smartphone contact list, it would be really really great if crew-manager roster information appeared in my smartphone contacts list for both my crew, and I.

This would be the same functionality we get from outlook, gmail, whatsapp, skype, and other applications on our Android smartphones.

This would be useful, because I tend to create that double entry into my smartphone so that
(i) When a crew member calls me, their first/late name appears on the phone instead of a phone number. E.g. we know to answer the call, rather than think it might be a spammer.
(ii) When a crew member texts us, their name appears on our phone
(iii) When the crew are texting each other (outside an event), they can see each others names in the text.
(iv) when we call a crew member, we can speak their name to our phone, like we do our non crew-manager contacts.

I don't know if this is possible for apps that do not reside in our phones. If it does not exist, perhaps there are workarounds to add via the internet, e.g. add a contact to my gmail or outlook mailbox.
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admin
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Re: Crew Manager Crew Roster appears in smartphone contact list

Post by admin »

I'll research to see how contacts may be imported to your phone. I'm sure as a minimum an export file could be created from Crew Manager that would allow the phone to import the contacts. I'm not as confident that a real time "contact sync" could be performed.
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Re: Crew Manager Crew Roster appears in smartphone contact list

Post by admin »

It looks like crew members may be easily exported as contacts to a consolidated vCard file that may be imported by the phone.  A custom group could be created in Crew Manager by the Skipper.  Then crew members may be added to this group, so that only the desired contacts would be imported to prevent duplicates.  Once the group was formed, the export from Crew manager could happen with the click of a button.  If this was done on the phone, it would be easy to import the file, or the file could be transferred from a desktop to the phone using other tools.

Would this approach work?
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Feature Incorporated: Crew Manager Crew Roster appears in smartphone contact list

Post by admin »

The ability to synchronize Crew Manager contacts with phone contacts is something that will be researched for the future. It is not easily done due to security and the different contact interfaces on various phones. However, a work around has been developed to permit bulk download and import of contacts.

All logged in users now have the ability to download the crew roster as a single vCard file containing all the selected group contacts that may be imported to phone contacts. The Skipper and Administrators may download custom groups that may have been defined by the Skipper. The new feature was incorporated on all sites as of 1:00pm 30 October 2019. Below are directions on how to download the contacts.
  1. Using the device you desire to import the Crew Manager contacts, mouse over Crew on the menu and click on Roster - Enter login information if requested.
  2. Use the dropdown to select the desired Crew group to display, then click the blue Select Crew Group... button
  3. A blue button appears at the bottom of the lists labeled Download xxx.vcf - the xxx displays the name of the group selected. Click this button to download the file.
  4. The file is downloaded to your device. Depending on the type of device, follow vendor directions appropriate for the device to import the vCard file.
The screen shot below displays a sample showing the screen layout with the buttons.
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