Recommendation for sharing contacts in a small office?

[cphansen]

We are a small office of 4 people, and 3 of us have the Pearl with Bell Mobility. Of the 3 BB users, 2 are on PCs with Outlook, and the other uses a Mac Powerbook.

I'm going around in circles. We are about to change email providers, and we have but one

We have a large list of clients we want to share and syncronize, so that when one user updates a contact or creates a new one using their BB or Outlook (or Mac equivalent), we all get the update.

Each user should also have personal contacts that are not shared between users, but are sync'ed between their Outlook and BB.

We do not need to sync calendars.

Email should be push, and we would like to migrate to IMAP, so that email info on the BB and Outlook appear the same. We have migrated to an unlimited data package from Bell Mobility.

We were going to go with Exchange/BES, but I think that is overkill. I've been looking at Google Apps (pro) and Fusemail, and even Unite! (though Unite seems scary and it doesn't help the non-BB user).

What do you gurus suggest?

[Frank Castle]

It sounds like you need a CRM based system for your sharing and regular BES / Exchange for contact sync. I'd check out Sage Act!

ACT! Industry Solutions – Customized ACT! Solutions (http://www.act.com/products/solutions/company/index.cfm?TYPE=comp&SID=76)

[biggdogg40509]

what i have done for my 120 or so users is created a shared folder in Outlook public folders with all of the University Dept contacts needed for everyone to have and when syncing units, add that folder to the sync.

[WFLDEng611]

For a really nice web based solution try 37 Signals products.

Simple small business software, collaboration, CRM: 37signals (http://37signals.com/)

[Frank Castle]

what i have done for my 120 or so users is created a shared folder in Outlook public folders with all of the University Dept contacts needed for everyone to have and when syncing units, add that folder to the sync.

Is that OTA sync or physical?

[cphansen]

Thanks for the suggestions.

First, we do not use Exchange, so I don't think we can have an Outlook public folder. Correct me if I'm wrong.

ACT! appears to be overkill. Plus, wouldn't that be $239 per user, per year? I might as well go hosted Exchange/BES.

37Signals looks like it has some good products, and the price is less than ACT!, but it's still a CRM, which is overkill in our environment.

There is no simple, shared contacts only solution? We don't even need OTA sync - physical sync will do.

Basically, I see the sharing diagram like this:

Shared Contacts Database (web-based?)
| | | |
Outlook1 Outlook2 Outlook3 MAC1
| | |
BB1 BB2 BB3


This should be some kind of web-based solution, because the MAC is off-site, and Outlook1 is a laptop computer.

So, each copy of Outlook (or the Mac equivalent) syncs with the common database, and the Blackberries sync physically. That's all we really need.

I know the quick answer is Exchange, but that's pricey for what seems to be such a simple problem.