3CX contacs / address book auto import

[Bembel]

We are still struggling with keeping 3CX contacts up-to-date - eg. phone numbers change, wrong name pops up - so I have created a scheduled task to create an importable csv file from ActiveDirectory with all employees' contact information on a daily basis. But for the time being I need to delete all contacts from within the portal and manually import this file to keep 3CX's address book on the current level.

While using private O365 address books and (to-be-discontinued by Microsoft) public folders is not an option can anybody point me in the right direction to automate this on the 3CX server. I am looking for the possibility to export, import and delete contacts - even worse that 3CX does not check to-be-imported contacts and you quickly end up with duplicates (hence deleting all before importing).

Hopefully 3CX is integrating with Microsoft Teams as an SBC so we can get rid of this issue - or we'll completely migrate telephony to O365 just to make it simpler...

 

[Francois_Kolibri]

Hello Bembel,

For the extensions having the issue with the wrong information, is it with the 3cx mobile app ?
If so, check if the user/extension already has the contact saved locally on the mobile device.

I think the phone will prioritize the info from the local contacts before the server's contacts.

 

[Bembel]

Dear Francois_Kolibri,

in this case the 3CX address book centrally stored on the 3CX server is outdated and needed to be updates - after doing so the Windows client on the user's machine was able to display the correct contact information again. As we have configured the Snom desktop phones to actively do LDAP lookups for incoming calls we don't have the problem on this part of the infrastructure.

But thank you very much for your input!

 

[VoIPTools]

I always prefer to offer a solution you can do yourself BEFORE suggesting using our tools. So I will explain what we did to solve this challenge. We wrote an application that authenticates to Active Directory (AD), then pulls all the users from the selected Organizational Units. We then compare the list from AD with the list of extensions in 3CX using the 3CX Call Control API.

Using the 3CX Call Control API, we identify any extensions missing in 3CX (mapping the extension number to the selected field in AD), and create it. If an extension exists in 3CX that no longer exists in AD, then we can disable / delete the extension.

If you don't want to build this solution yourself, I encourage you to take a look at our3CX Active Directory Sync tool. I just realized our landing page is a little outdated, but we now support creating as well as disabling extensions. You can also assign extensions to groups automatically (based on values in AD), and archive existing voicemails and recordings when automatically deleting extensions.