Best Practice: How to synchronize Office 365 Contacts to your Apple iPhones and iPads

Microsoft Office 365 is a cloud service including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and other solutions. Office 365 comes with three stores for contact data:

  • Exchange Global Adress List of Exchange Online
  • Exchange Contact Folders in Shared Mailboxes and Public Folders
  • SharePoint Lists with addresses or other contact information

This data can be accesses on your PC with Microsoft Outlook or a Web Browser. To bring the address book data from Office 365 to your iPhones and iPads, PeopleSync is a great solution. PeopleSync is able to sync the GAL, Contact Folders and SharePoint Lists to iPhone or other devices and applications. PeopleSync works with Office 365 as well as the on-premise servers, such as Exchange Server and SharePoint Server.

To bring contact data from Office 365 Contacts and other data sources to your mobile devices from Apple and other vendors, PeopleSync is the perfect solution. PeopleSync and Apple iOS devices both support the standardized prootocols LDAP and CardDAV:

  • The LDAP protocol allows an online search in the PeopleSync Directory. This protocol can be used to make the Office 365 Contacts available without synchronization. The address books can be searched online, but Caller ID resolution won’t be available with LDAP on the iPhones.
  • The CardDAV protocol is used for offline synchronization of PeopleSync Address Lists to the native iOS Adress Book application. The availability of the data in the iOS Adress Book is a requirement to resolve numbers of incoming calls or in your missed calls lists.

Both protocols can be published via your firewall for availability via 3G. Alternatively a company can decide to grant users access to PeopleSync via VPN or in the corporate WiFi network only.

peoplesync sync office 365 contacts to iphones peoplesync sync office 365 contacts to iphones peoplesync sync office 365 contacts to iphones