Experiencing challenges with contacts in the new roll out

Hi Sherrie,

Thanks for the reply.

Also, I noticed a typo. The second item should read, "...change to a contact in one group does NOT change the same data in another group."

Thanks again,

Jim

hi Jim,

I hope I can help a bit. To respond to your issues in order:

1. This isn't supposed to happen, and sounds like a bug. We've tested before the release and didn't see this, but if you can describe a reproducible case, that would help us find the problem.

2. This is the way the new sharing model works. In the past, the contacts you had "shared" were never really shared to begin with, they were just "linked", which meant when you changed something in one group, you had to remember to update them in the other groups (the linking mechanism was a way to make it easier to do that). Now, your links from before are broken, but you can do a one-time fixup to actually create proper shares for the contacts. After that, updates will truly be shared. The Notes and Tags are kept separate for each group.

3. As at the end of above, if you want to keep information which is private to the group, you can put it in the Notes, or create Tags. If you need to keep multiple contacts with different levels of info (for example one with just name and email, and another with name/email/phone/address/etc.), then you can keep those as separate contacts, and share them as appropriate. In the future we plan to add a feature to allow people to claim their contacts and control the sharing aspects themselves, so you could allow groups with references to your contact (even ones you don't know about) to link to your public contact card instead, and you would have control over what level of information you want to make public.

4. This shouldn't have happened. We had to do an internal data migration as part of the rollout, but it wasn't supposed to create any new contacts. Is it possible that you're seeing contacts included from Master Groups (are you using those?) which you might have had disabled before? Is it also possible that someone else created shares for those contacts already and you're just seeing the result of that? The contact card display shows you some info about that. If you can't find any other explanation for how the contacts appeared and you're willing to let us look at your data, then please get in touch with us and we can track down where they came from.

5. I'm not sure about the [] brackets either. Can you be more specific about where you're seeing them?

Thanks,

Jim

First off, I am impressed that you guys have had the strength of will to try giving such a violently different interface to your users. This is more than what most people consider an "upgrade"; more different than any two versions of microsoft windows that I can think of, even the change after 3.1. Kudos for all your work.

Second, I am Very Happy to have images in my contacts. I've been waiting a long time for it, and plan to have lots of fun. One minor note, I added the image field to my "list view", and it spread out the line spacing hugely... it would be helpful if the image was resized (using the html attributes I mean) based on the width of the column allocated for it.

Next, I have the problem #2 listed above, and it is a huge problem. Without linking, I have scrambled eggs.

Last, I have the problem #3 listed above, and it is MONSTEROUS. The "new way" seems to make it so there is only one contact record for a person (I'm going to make up some examples for discussion: Fred), with just slightly different permissions based on group. In the "old way", each group had their own Fred record, and the user had to do a little more management to sync up the differences periodically. Yes, this was work, but important work, because some groups (church) NEED certain information (say, "home_phone") and other groups (tech support users) must NOT have it. Not, "shouldn't edit", which the new way nicely provides, but "shouldn't SEE". I could make a second record for Fred, but that clutters up my lists, and also makes a redundancy that will cause its own data sync problems in the future.

Please tell me what I am not seeing, or understanding. This is Bad.

OMG - the new contacts list is not working for me either!

You have made the contacts list hard to get at - and now too many clicks to get at your contact.

I cannot share either!

It almost seems like you have gone backwards with this version.

What happend to the ONE Click Navigation - seeing everything in front of you on the screen?????

It takes longer to view every thing and takes multiple clicks - NO GOOD!

all contacts should be have icon or be visible in front of you like a book so you can see all

I don't like this view - you should ask your engineer to put on an additonal view obtion that allows for one click navigation please!

Jim-

Thanks for the reply.

1) The need to refresh is random. It always involves the all web computers and the share view.

2) I stand corrected. Before the data did not change, but I was allowed to view differences and choose which to display in each group. A very useful feature.

3) This is a huge let down; maybe a deal breaker. Currently, I have 1,019 contacts which are shared to various groups. In the former version, I was able to select information to share or not to share based on the group and the field which held the data. Now I will have to maintain the data in at least 5 stand alone groups in order to keep some data private. Or I can expand my contact list to more than 3,000 contacts, at a minimum. This is a real let down.

4) I've only checked out a few, but all of them so far have been contacts which were members of a single group, all of which had never logged into AirSet, and which are now members of another group to which they have never been a member, but which did have a family member in that group. This is pretty easy to fix. It will take a little time, but is really not a big deal.

5) Using desktop sync when syncing with outlook, in the past categories were supposed to be in brackets. I don't know what function that adds, if any, since the new roll out. Are all of my groups in brackets now outdated, or is this still something I should be doing?

Thanks for the response,

Jim

I should note (in case it's not clear, and maybe it's not) that there is no restriction in the system such that you can only have one contact per person.

As such, the previous version was happy to let you keep separate copies of the contacts (which is all they were) between your groups. The linking feature was only there to make it easier to push changes between them.

In the new version, there's still nothing stopping you from keeping separate copies of the contacts in each group (now called a web computer). There's also nothing preventing you from having custom sharing arrangements, where one contact with full info is shared to some groups, and another with less info is shared with others. In the future there will probably be an option for field-by-field sharing, as well as field-based annotations, which should make this a little easier.

The changes here have been a balance between trying to make the service more useful for "regular" users (not organizers), while still trying to give organizers the flexibility they need. My guess is that those of you, who sound like you're organizers or admins, who are noticing the difficulty with this, are probably the ones who were less in need of this kind of sharing to begin with. It's really meant to benefit the ordinary Tom and Mary who are members of a group and view its contacts, and want to have a better chance of making sure the contact info they see is kept current. By creating real shares to data (rather than links, which require organizer attention), any change to the data will automatically be seen by all those who share it. This sword can cut both ways, of course.

National Appliance, about the one click navigation: I assume you're referring to the old contacts card view which showed multiple cards on the screen at once? We changed it because for many people it was slow to navigate, and if you had more than a few contacts, they didn't all fit on the screen to begin with. With that said, if there's a big demand for the original view format, I'm sure we'll consider that. We tried to make the view, search, and tagging options more flexible in the new release, so it's hopefully easier for you to get the information in front of you that you need.

Also, if you're currently using AirSet with IE6, we have found a problem with it and Contacts in some cases, and are working on a fix. If there's any way for you to use IE7, or better Firefox, please give that a try. Even when we are able to work around the bugs in IE6, the performance is still terrible because IE6 is just simply a really slow browser. We have to support it for a while because some users don't have admin rights to their PC to install new software, but there's really no good reason anyone should still be using it if they have a choice about it.

Also, I forgot this earlier: Categories are now called Tags, but otherwise they are used the same, especially with regard to Sync. If you had to use the [] in Sync before, then you would keep using them now, and shouldn't notice any change.

@Jim: "...separate copies of the contacts... where one contact with full info is shared to some groups, and another with less info is shared with others...";

Yes, I realize I can "make a second record for Fred", as I mentioned in my reply above, but that creates an additional administrative burden, confusion, and trouble..

"Fred" and the groups I mentioned, were the best example I could think of. My personal problems are not as clear cut, but I wanted to try and Show the problem at its worst. MY problems are more like "do I want to share my (or my son's) birthday with my neighborhood association, though I really want to share it with my extended family"

Actually, thinking about it some more though, the whole "second record" thing, I don't see how that's going to work at all.

Let's say we have "George", who's in my "archery club". He's a great friend of mine, but not a member of airset. The administrator of the club, "Tom" IS a member of airset, and administrates the club in airset. I have two records for George, because I know Suzie, his spouse, and other personal information the archery club doesn't need. This is a pain, because my phonelist now stupidly has two entries for Tom, but he's a good friend, so to remember his kid's names, I put up with it.

Now lets say George changes something, say his business phone, and updates his membership with the club. This information winds up in one of his records, but I get not so much as a warning that the other record contains inconsistent data. Unless George personally tells me, AND I update the second record, it won't happen. I have LOST THE BENEFIT OF NETWORK SHARED CONTACTS.

Actually, thinking about it more, multiple contacts for one person is such an outrage I don't think I can put up with it. in the case of "Fred" I would have NO CHOICE, because that case was built around REQUIREMENTS of MUST HAVE, and MUST NOT HAVE, but my personal cases are not as black and white.

My cases ARE strong enough, though, that I will be forced to either use the LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR, or something even more violent, maybe I'll even have to go back to Outlook.

Jim,

Although I see your point about allowing user's to edit their own information, and yes, I understand that this is the model AirSet intends to see as the one to pursue, I see the reality is that this is not a real working model for most of your AirSet users. The reality is that most of your users only go to AirSet because your organizers send them there; your organizers maintain the group; your organizers maintain the contact lists; your organizers maintain the rosters, calendars, files, etc. The people that I have delegated this to only do it because I tell them to do it.

IOW, if your organizers go away, so do 90% of your users. Look at the stats on the accounts to verify this. In my groups, about 10% of the users actually log in to AirSet on a regular basis; the others are completely satisfied to receive email reminders from the calendar and to log in to AirSet when they have misplaced someones contact information or need to access a file.

Contact information was a critical selling point when I met with the senior staff at the church. They are sold on the idea of contacting their membership through a more cost effective means. However, this means that accurate personal information is a must, and as an organizer I supply that information. If someone wants to update their data on their own, I am grateful and will support them in any way possible---but I understand that they are the exception, as the vast majority will want me to do it for them. The truth is that if I don't do it for them, they are quite content to let their data become outdated and unusable.

The contact data is sensitive. It doesn't matter that the same information is available in a few clicks on google, if a member doesn't want specific information published, I have to make sure that it does not get published. By the same token, I must be able to share detailed information with groups that have a need to know personal and detailed information.

Under the old system I could do this (not easily, but it could be done), but the new system has tied my hands and does not allow me to perform this function. Yes, I can create new contacts for each member to share with each group, but that easily triples my work load in maintaining contacts and almost ensures that there will be quite a few errors.

This is a huge step backwards for your primary users as it takes away functionality.

I have about thirty days until I am to meet with some of the church leaders that I will be reporting to about this very issue. When I agreed to the meeting date, I had no clue that this curve ball was coming my way. I really, really need this fixed in order for AirSet to be a viable option. If we have to use another media, such as a desktop application for maintaining contact information, I doubt that I can generate a great deal of enthusiasm beyond the calendar. As I said before, this is a deal breaker.

Thanks for listening,

Jim

Wow, quite a passionate discussion about the contacts changes. It's hard to say this to you guys (Jim & Greenup), because, well, you're like us, meaning you are two of the rare AirSet users (other than the AirSet engineers) who figured out and appreciated the old sharing model, but I am sorry to say this is not likely to be restored going forward. Most people simply never figured it out or used it properly. As JimC pointed out above, in the old model you really had a separate contact in every single group with some reasonably complex software that would maintain a linkage between those contacts so that you could compare changes made across the groups. To my knowledge no other contact system in the world works this way, as a result, most users simply never really understood it. Additionally, after using it ourselves for 4 years and doing thousands of customer service interactions we realized that only a handful of contacts typically need or benefit from all that complexity, far more likely would be the confusion that you thought you had shared a contact to another group but changes in one group did not show up in the other. Or people were really frustrated that they could not share contacts directly between groups. Since multiple people access the contacts in each group, contacts had to be shared through your personal contacts so that each user had their own ability to filter what changes got replicated. I was personally involved in the design of this approach (you could argue I twisted the lead engineer's arm to implement it this way) but after years of experience I've come to the conclusion it was the wrong decision.

You might consider it the tyranny of the majority, i.e. we have simplified the service to make is more accessible to a larger audience but there are some real benefits, for example the way the new contacts works, the same physical contact is shared from group to group, like wikipedia, the more successful we become the more likely your contacts are going to be self-healing, meaning someone in the network, maybe even someone you have never met, is helping to keep your contacts accurate. It's hard to accept the reliability of the "wisdom of the crowd" approach, but it has been proven to work.

The multiple card approach is what the rest of the world has taken (Plaxo and other like services). You have a business card and a personal card. One has just business info and the other has everything. It's overly simplistic, but it works for most of the world and is easy to understand. We have improved upon this by letting each group have its own private notes field, so you can place info you don't want to be shared there.

Brian-

Thanks for the reply.

To be clear, I don't want to go back to the old system...I just want similar functionality in the new system to what was available in the old system. Primarily, I don't want to have to make a separate contact for every person that is in multiple groups. This is an ongoing waste of my time.

Simple is good; simpler is better. If simple is chosen over functional, progress is lost. We have lost functionality in this update.

My experience with wikipedia is that it is a good general source of information, but that it is rife with errors when drilling down to the details of a subject. The groups I manage are periodically updated by going to the individuals and confirming that the information we have on file is correct. I can't imagine that the general sharing of a cyber committee would be more accurate than going to the person that the information pertains to.

Yes, Plaxo and others have taken the multiple card approach, but I don't use Plaxo or the others.

Placing the information that is to remain private in the notes field would work for some instances, but would be cumbersome for others. In some instances, complete addresses, occupations, and places of employment, are to be hidden from general view. The ability to select which fields are displayed when shared or even to select which fields are displayed within a group would eliminate a substantial portion of the problem.

Jim

Brian, I am sure that your team has had an overwhelming amount of support calls with the previous system. It *was* admittedly complex. But powerful. Most powerful things are. Even the "simple, powerful" things usually have hidden complexity. From my perspective, however, someone has taken away my "Shop Smith Mark V", given me a normal tablesaw, and said something like: "that old tool caused us too much liability, so we've decided to fix it by cutting back to something a broader audience can cope with." Airset was best-in-class before, and now you've decided to copy your competitors.

You also mentioned the Wikipedia model. Thank you, you have highlighted something for me that I have been neglectful of. Backups. One reason wiki model works well is because defacements are easy to fix. All the previous versions are close at hand, so if someone scrubs a page, it takes Seconds to fix. With the old model, if someone scrubbed a group's contacts, I still had My copies. I'm sure you're going to say something about administrative permissions, but everybody gets grumpy some days, and how long will it be before someone in a position of trust violates it? Probably about as long as it takes a dot-com to go bust or change their model.

It also comes to mind that wikipedia restricts their topics to things that are "broadly known", Any particular group of my contact list is only interesting or known to 30-40 people, and the broadest "airset takeup" I have is maybe 30%.

Thanks for the backup reminder.

By the sounds of this discussion thread it doesn't look like you will be making the contacts more user friendly.

I understand that if the contacts list grows it might become hard to navigate for some.

I am a visual person - I am not good with lists - I work better with pictures

I agree with niss63 - I think in this case you have chosen simple over function and are dissapointed but will learn to live with it because I like to use Airset - It is a very good work horse for my buisness and myself!

I have grappled with the contacts issue and have decided that I will probably export my contacts to a spreadsheet, delete the unwanted fields for a particular group, convert to .csv and then upload them into the group's contacts. Not a great work around, and it is prone to errors due to format changes, but I don't see a lot of options. I can do this about once a quarter without the investment of time that maintaining multiple databases would require.

I support the need for an update the contacts program--it was clunky. I understand the whys and wherefores of the decision to go the direction that Airena chose to go. I see added functionality that was needed and is an improvement. I also see that Airena, in their desire to embrace the cloud computing, connectivity, and ether sharing model, have not realized that the driving force behind the use of their product is the organizer, project manager, hands on git 'er done, type A, OCD, 2nd in command, person with a nerd or techie streak. Without these pushers, the average user would be oblivious to AirSet and certainly would never sign up for the service, great as it is.

It is said that at any given time, 25% of your customers are dissatisfied enough to switch to a competitor's service. I am there with AirSet. However, a few things keep me on board:

*They do care about their customers.

*Overall the new roll out is better.

*In some areas it is much better.

*The calendar really rocks!

*And finally, nothing else even comes close!!

So, let this thread die and let's move on to makin' this program really good for everyone!!!

Jim

In my setting, AirSet is only used by two people. Me and my partner both have a PDA and we have used AirSet to share calendar events and contacts. Due to personal preferences, I always list my contacts as Last Name, First Name whereas my girlfriend files them as First Name Last Name. All was going well with the previous version, and we could edit a shared contact to our needs without imposing our personal preference on the other. This was brilliant.

I was about to file a bug report, concerning the fact that I was unable to edit a shared contact without affecting the shared contact's base information: whenever I changed a shared contact to be filed as Last Name, First Name, the contact would show up like that in my girlfriend's contact list as well. Then I came across this thread. If I'm not mistaken, I don't need to file a bug report because this functionality has simply been removed, right?

If so, then I'm sorry to say that I'm really utterly disappointed by that.

To end on a more positive note I do have the feeling that AirSet's performance has improved, most notably the contacts application.

Hmm, just as a follow up, we've abandoned the whole shared contacts business. We'll just update our contacts ourselves again. The shared calendar still works great though.

I agree with Robert. I'll likely abandon the contacts application as well. I may even abandon AirSet completely, as it's contact management was the one thing it had over something like Google Calendar. Once I abandon contacts, Google Calendar does every thing I need as well as AirSet.