WebProNews

Tag: Managing contacts

  • Sprint Lets Subscribers Use Their Name as Their Number

    I’ll admit it. There are only a couple of numbers in my smartphone’s contacts list that I know by heart, and I only know those because I’ve known them since before I got a cell phone. I couldn’t tell you my girlfriend’s phone number from memory if you put me on the spot.

    Today, Sprint is making it easier for all of us by unveiling its StarStar Me program. The feature will function as a sort of phone number DNS service, allowing users to pick a short name, word, or phrase, proceeded by two asterisks, in place of their number. For example, I might choose to be contacted by **SEANP, my first name and last initial (the nickname has to be 5 to 9 characters long, so I can’t use just my first name).

    “Sprint customers will be the first people to get StarStar Me,” said Kevin McGinnis, vice president of Product and Technology Development at Sprint. “We expect this service to be especially popular with professionals, students and family customers, who can tailor its use to their individual preferences, lifestyles and interests with a few simple clicks.”

    The only catch is that the service won’t be free. Sprint subscribers will be charged $3 per month for the feature. There is a smartphone app that goes along with it, though. It enables features such as managing incoming calls, automatic texting, and sending contact information, including social media accounts. The app is currently available for Android, and will be coming to iOS soon.

    Sprint has set up a website for subscribers to choose their StarStar nickname, and those who want the service should sign up quickly to get their desired moniker. As expected, many common names are already taken, though some provocative combos such as **STEVEJOBS, **BILLGATES, **BRUCELEE, **TOMHANKS and **BOBAMA are still available.

    Below is an explanatory ad that Sprint released to coincide with the launch of the service. Though **CHLOE and **JAVAGUY are taken, some of the nicknames shown in the video (such as **SUPERMOM) are still available.

  • Google Adds New Ways to Manage and Share Contacts

    You already know that Google is always looking for ways to enhance user experience and this time they are adding some new features that will Google+Enterprise+Blog%29″>allow you to share your contacts list in different ways. As always, the inspiration for the upgrades comes via feedback from users.

    To begin with, they have added a contact delegation feature. It sounds like an invasion of privacy to merely hand over your information to someone so they extract contacts from your personal “My Contacts” list, but they have addressed the issue.

    Here’s how they explain it on their support site:

    Contacts delegation allows users to delegate full access to the contacts in their “My Contacts” group without granting access to their mail or anything else in their accounts. This is a common delegation practice between some executive users and their assistants and may be used in any situation where a user wishes to share all of his or her contacts with another user.

    Contacts delegation uses a familiar Apps sharing interface. You may delegate your contacts only to other users within your domain. Like mail delegation, you may delegate your contacts to no more than 25 other users at the same time. Delegation allows the sharing of the entire “My Contacts” list only. You cannot delegate a subset of your “My Contacts” or delegate contacts not in your “My Contacts.”

    Here are some step-by-step directions:

    1.) Go to Google Contacts.

    2). Click the More pulldown menu immediately above your contacts list and select Manage Delegation Settings.

    3). In the Add people text box, enter the email addresses of the users you wish to share your contacts.

    4). Click Share & save to finish granting the specified users access to your contacts.

    Google has also added a shared directory for everyone in your domain to edit and share. It is a browseable and searchable list of user names and email addresses that even includes nicknames and aliases. As the administrator you can adult the settings to control who does and who doesn’t appear in the directory.

    To change which email addresses appear in the Google Apps Directory:

    1). Sign in to the Google Apps administrator control panel.

    The URL is https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/primary-domain-name, where primary-domain-name is the domain name you used to sign up for Google Apps.

    2). Click Settings in the menu bar, then Contacts in the left menu.

    3). Under Contact Settings, select Enable contact sharing.

    4). Specify which email addresses to include in the shared contact list:

    * Show all email addresses: Include both the primary email address and nicknames or alias addresses for users in the domain
    Note: Domain aliases and multiple domain addresses remain hidden in the domain’s Global Address List (GAL), Directory, and autocomplete.

    * Hide nicknames: Include only primary email addresses; aliases and nicknames are hidden

    * Hide the primary email address if the user has a nickname: Include a user’s manually entered nickname for all contacts; hide the user’s primary email address, aliases, and other user’s nicknames for the contact

    5). Choose what is shown in the browsable directory in Contact Manager:

    * Show only domain profiles: Include profiles of users with accounts in your domain only.

    * Show only domain shared contacts: Include contacts added to the list using the Domain Shared Contacts API. They are people who don’t have email addresses in your domain, but who your people need to be able to contact.

    * Show both domain profiles and domain shared contacts: Include both the aforementioned internal users and external contacts.

    6). Click Save changes.

    Hopefully these changes will make your life a little easier and your user experience more pleasant. To learn more about any of the features follow the links associated with them.