Jim's dashboard

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.

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.

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