Shared contacts

• About sharing
• Making a contact shared
• Creating a shared group
• Adding a contact to a shared group
• Removing shared contacts
• Accessing shared contacts on a device

About sharing

Sharing contacts is an easy way to let all users in an account have access to common address book entries.

• Businesses can share their corporate directory easily.
• Families can share contact information of extended family members.

Individual contacts can be shared, in which case they show up under a user's All Contacts list; or they can be shared as part of a contact group.

An administrator controls which contacts and groups are shared. Once shared, contacts and groups are visible to all users in an account.

Shared contacts are automatically whitelisted across all users in the account, ensuring they will never be marked as spam.

Making a contact shared

1. Go to the Contacts page.
2. From the contact list, select the contact to be made shared. Edit them.
3. Mark the checkbox Share contact

Once a contact has been removed from all shared groups, this checkbox can be unchecked to stop sharing them.

To share more than one contact at a time, select multiple contacts from the Contacts list and use the Share menu item to Share contact. To stop sharing, use the Make Private option instead.

Creating a shared group

1. Go to the Settings → Contacts → Groups page.
2. Click to Create Group.
3. Give your new group a name and select Share this group with everyone in my account
4. Save.

You'll now see the new group show up in the list of groups in the contacts list.

Once a group is created, its type cannot be changed: you cannot modify a private group and transform it into a shared group. A shared group can only contain shared contacts.

Adding a contact to a shared group

Once a contact is shared, you can add it to a shared group.

1. Go to the Contacts page.
2. From the contact list, select the contacts to be added to the shared group, using the checkboxes.
3. Using the Groups dropdown, select the target shared group.

Removing shared contacts

Removing contacts from a group is the same as adding them, just in reverse.

1. Go to the Contacts page.
2. Select the group the contacts belong to.
3. From the contact list, select the contacts to be removed from the shared group, using the checkboxes.
4. Using the Groups dropdown, select the group to remove them from.

Note that while this removes the contact from the shared group, the contact remains shared. It needs to be separately unshared to make it a private contact again.

Removing a contact from a shared group, or marking a contact unshared does not delete the contact from the admin user's contact list.

Accessing shared contacts on a device

See our detailed guide on accessing contacts on devices.