[SOLVED] Sharing company contacts to local Address Books: possible?

[akimbo]

Hi,

I'm doing a trial for our small (10 person) virtual company, 8 of whom use Macs. One of my main goals is to enable a shared list of company contacts across our team, and to allow everyone to access these contacts from the Mac address book. Being able to edit these contacts is a plus, but not a requirement.

Our host (01.com, who know Macs and have been great so far) has suggested that we create a company mailbox (company@domain.com) and share its address book out to all team members.

I know that this will work if everyone uses the web interface. I'm trying to understand how we can use the iSync connector to share company contacts down to team members' local address books.

Here's a bad illustration of our desired situation:


But in looking at the iSync connector, it seems that it doesn't allow "down only" connections... but that it does a full sync between the client user's Address Book and the shared book in the cloud. Won't this mean that each client's addresses are sync'd up to the company book on the cloud... and then consequently sync'd down to all the other client machines?

Is there another way to set this up so that my team can share a common list of contacts, and access them via the address book?

Thanks, in advance, for any helpful insights here.

-- Doug

[akimbo]

Responding to my own thread, after a conversation with support at 01.com. The scary multi-contact up/down scenario I pictured in my second graphic could occur if I had each local user sync using the company@domain.com account, but that's not the correct setup.

Each individual user sets up iSync to sync to their own account; since the company@domain.com account shares out to each user, those contacts then sync down to the local address books. Individual users' contacts do sync up to the cloud, but not to the shared book. Yeah!

So now I'm going to set it up and see if it really works that way