One-way synchronisation of company contacts into 3CX

[alexdb]

Hello,

I am trying to determine how to push company wide contacts into 3CX (not personal contacts). The company has many thousands of contacts that we would like them to be accessible via the Web client.

Criteria is:
- One-way push of contacts from our ERP to 3CX (we might be able to sync this with Office 365 or Azure AD if needed)
- Does NOT rely on the external contact to call in first
- If contact is updated on our ERP, the contact is updated in 3CX.

So far, my research leads me to believe there is only two ways of populating the company contacts
1) Via the GUI, manually import 1000 entries at a time via csv - obviously this is not a solution.
2) Via a SQL database or CRM solution, however, the requirement here is that the external contact calls the 3CX phone system first. Further, any updates made on the CRM system are not updated on 3CX, so contact information on 3CX remains stale.

Across the company we have an average of 40 contact changes per day (add/delete/modify), so manual entry or stale contacts unacceptable.

When we first bought 3CX there was an API available that our internal developers would have been able to work with, however less than 6 months after signing up the API is now gone so our options are very limited. The API was one of the key drivers to our move to 3CX.

Any assistance is appreciated!

 

[SteveITS]

Is it one of the preprogrammed CRMs? https://www.3cx.com/call-center/crm-integration/
That page also has info on the APIs to write your own...?

For what it's worth, with the ConnectWise integration we found that if the service URL changes (which it does with new ConnectWise versions) the contact will be created again in 3CX with the new URL. Workaround is to delete all CRM contacts periodically (web admin->Advanced->Contacts->Delete CRM Contacts).

 

[alexdb]

No unfortunately it's not one of the pre-programmed CRMS, we use IBM Notes.

 

[JohnS_3CX]

You can perhaps do it via exchange, which allows public contact sync into your 3CX company contacts.
However, if they are updated in the ERP, they need to be updated in Exchange before finally being updated in 3CX
https://www.3cx.com/docs/manual/pbx-crm-integration/

 

[alexdb]

I would prefer not to use exchange as that would require us to run a whole server (licenses and all).

Is there a method via office 365?

 

[JohnS_3CX]

Hi Alexd,

As far as I'm aware, not at the moment. For now you can only import Private Contacts of users into 3CX Personal Phonebooks.