Setting up your connection to your Google Contacts is simple and easy.
Before you start
- You need to have a login when you start CMS.
Watch how to do this here.
- Enable the Google Contacts module.
Click Program Setup > Options > Custom tab and check the Google Contacts Integration check box.
Get Authorized
Now all you need to do is enter your email and grant CMS access to your Contacts.
- Click Tasks > Contacts.
- Enter your Email Address
- Click Authorize.
You will be directed to a Google login screen. Click "Allow" to grant authorization to Chabad Management System to access your Contacts.
You can have multiple logins to CMS. Each login can have their own connection to a Google Account.
Each time you update a contact, the system will update all the Google Accounts that this contact is linked.
Use discretion in this area: adding too many accounts will slow the system down. We recommend no more than linking two users' Google accounts.
Note: Depending on the Google approval status of the CMS App, you might get a message from Google that the app is not yet verified and cautioning you about continuing. You'll need to click "Advanced" and then "Go to Chabad Management..." in order to click Allow.
You can Revoke access to your contacts at any time by clicking the Revoke button.
Doing this will undo the Authorization and will clear any links between CMS and Google contacts. Contacts in Google will not be deleted.
Add your Contacts
Before you add your contacts to Google, we strongly recommend to start with a clean slate in Google Contacts. Consider even making a new Google Account for this purpose. E.g. cms@mychabadhouse.com (using Google Suite) or mychabadcms@gmail.com. This will avoid having duplicate contacts in Google.
- Click Tasks > Contacts
- Click Select Contacts
- Choose All Not Synced or use a Filter
- Click Check All or manually check the ones you want to Sync.
- Click Update Google.
Take a lunch break. The initial migration of your contacts to Google can take a long time. It takes a second or two for each contact. Exact time varies on your Internet speed and your computer. If you have 3000 contacts, that can take an hour or so. You will see the progress move along and each contact that is added will say "success" in the status.
If there are any errors (loss of power, went off line, etc.), not to worry. You can always resume from where you left off.
You can also edit an individual contact in CMS and check or uncheck the Google check box to add and remove this person, respectively, from your Google Contacts.
If you have multiple Google accounts linked, you need to do this for each account.
Each account can have a different set of contacts being synced.
Once your contacts are uploaded, whenever you make a change to a contact, the linked Google Contact(s) is updated instantly. Manual changes, online form submissions, NCOA updates and even CMS Cloud updates, will all trigger an instant change to the linked Google Contact.
Please note: We simplified the integration with Google Contacts in the following ways:
- Independent of CMS Connected.
CMS Connected is not needed for Authorizing your Google Account. After the initial authorization, any computer / CMS user on the network, can renew the Tokens. This happens silently and automatically directly within the main CMS program. So you'll never get the Expired Token errors.
- Removed bi-directional synchronization. Changes you make to a Google Contact will not be updated in CMS. This change is because we found that Google Contacts were being updated automatically by various systems and those changes caused data in CMS to become malformed. Rollbacks have also been removed, since CMS data is not being updated by Google.
- Groups are no longer supported.
We found that using Groups made the contacts less accessible (in some devices) and introduced bugs and synchronization issues.
- By popular request, the Title field has been removed from the synchronization. Reason: for most phones, having the title as part of the name would cause the last name to be (partially) hidden (phone calls etc.) due to space limitations.
Requires CMS Version 21.7.27 or higher.