One address book between all users

Hi, I’m new to Nextcloud and I’m just trying to get my head around the Contacts app.

Is it possible to have just one address book shared between all users (or all users in a particular User Group) that everybody can edit, including adding/removing contacts groups, and sync to their macs/iphones?

Does one user need to create an address book and share it with everybody else to do this, or is there some default shared address book that I’m not seeing somehow.

Usually at least one user need to create an address book and share it with a group of users. Edit permissions can be granted if necessary. Unfortunately you’re not explaining what the main purpose is which you want to achieve. I personally made the experience that it is always better to have only one editor per address book and all other users get read access to it. Otherwise everyone follows his own rules and the records are not correctly filled with data.

Thanks j-ed. The main purpose is to share an address book across all users that each user can edit and maintain without having to rely on anybody else.

We’re a small business of 3 people and historically we’ve shared an address book (using iCloud) between 5 people without any problems.

I have already followed the steps you described but I don’t like that the address book is then labelled as being mine instead of the whole group’s. Perhaps a way around this is to share it from a generic user admin account instead of my personal user account.

I’ve haven’t tested it fully yet but I have been noticing some weird behaviour syncing with in macOS (i.e. only syncing in one direction, not syncing at all). Will the above approach allow everybody to sync contacts to in macOS without any problems (using the macOS/iOS profile configuration?

I never had problems to sync my contacts in both directions as I used an iOS device. I could imagine, that having multiple editors on multiple devices might result in unexpected results if e.g. changes of a single record are initiated at the same time.
Are there any related log entries in the Nextcloud log file if you try to sync a record back to the server? Afaik, changes should be instantly visible on the server on iOS.

1 Like

Yeah iOS is not a problem. It’s macOS that is.

Found this unresolved bug from 2018:

And a possible fix?

Please note that macOS (as of Catalina 10.15.4) is still not able to syncronize more than one addressbook per carddav account. If one of your users has another addressbook in his account additionaly to the one shared for all users - macOS will only syncronize one addressbook (which very likely will be the first one in alphabetical order).

For more details see here:

1 Like

Yes, it works pretty well. Using it on two iMacs, more iPads and even more iPhones.

1 Like

Are you able to sync macOS with Nextcloud Contacts groups and vice versa? I’m finding mine don’t sync in either direction.

No, the groups in Nextcloud are not available in macOS contacts. They information is synched, but the groups are not usable.

1 Like

Weirdly, what I’ve found is that macOS contacts groups don’t appear in the Contacts app in Nextcloud, but they do sync to other users of macOS

Not sure how that works, seems like very strange behaviour, but that’s just what we need as we won’t really be using the Nextcloud interface much.

macOS stores groups as a contact with the name of that group. This is not caldav - it is just the way Apple does it.
In your Nextcloud-Webinterface you will see a contact with the name of the group and no content (this is caldav!). If that contact is synced to other Apple-Devices, they show it as a group instead of a contact like Nextcloud does.
Since you don’t use the webinterface much it shouldn’t bother you. It is just good to know to not delete that group-contact if you stumble over it in the webinterface.

1 Like

Awesome, thanks for that explanation Bernie.

1 Like