Bye Bye BetterCloud: Migrate contact management and more to Patronum

SaaS Operations Management company, BetterCloud, recently announced that they are discontinuing their Google Contact Sharing features. The main reason for this is that as of January 1st 2022, Google will discontinue support for the Contacts API, and BetterCloud has stated that it will not be upgrading to the new Google People API.

In this article, we’ll offer you an alternative to BetterCloud as we walk you through the process in order to smoothly migrate your BetterCloud Contact Sharing to Patronum Shared Contacts.

Why is this happening?

The Google Contacts API is one of the last old XML based Google Data API’s to be deprecated. Google has been slowly deprecating all API’s that uses the GData API as they migrate to more modern APIs for their services. It, therefore, comes as no surprise that they’ve set an official end to the Google Contacts API. The Google People API on the other hand is a much new offering that follows modern REST conventions. It’s designed to merge identities from multiple Google products, such as Google Contacts, Gmail, Google+, and Google user profiles in order to provide a single API that gives access to all these services. Software development organisations using the old Google Contacts API will need to migrate to the new People API.

How to migrate from BetterCloud Contact Sharing?

Many organisations have been using BetterCloud for contact management and sharing, however as already mentioned this will soon come to an end. 

As of January 1st, 2022 those organisations using BetterCloud will start to see the following restrictions:

• Google Workspace administrators will no longer be able to add new contacts into shared labels. 
• Users with edit access will not be able to add or update the contacts.
• Contact information will not be synchronised to iOS and Andriod mobile devices.
• Users will no longer be able to create new shared contacts.
• The different permissions (View Only, Can Edit) will stop working.

Put simply, your organisations’ contacts will very quickly end up out of date. So, if you want to continue sharing contacts and also pushing Directory Contacts to users then you need to switch to Patronum as soon as possible, and follow the easy steps below:

1. Install Patronum. Installing Patronum is easy, simply go to the Google Workspace Marketplace and search for Patronum, once installed you can start to disable the services within BetterCloud.
2. Disable BetterCloud sharing. Log into BetterCloud and unshare all the existing labels that are currently being shared. This operation will need to be performed before 1st of January 2022, otherwise the “unsharing” process will fail to work.
3. Share in Patronum. Log into Patronum and access the Contact Sharing section via the Contacts Menu. From here select the original owner of the Google Contact Label and share as desired. Selecting “Migrate” will inform Patronum that this is a migration from an alternative contact sharing system and will prevent duplicate labels from being generated.

Patronum is more than just Contact Sharing

Many Google Workspace organisations are making the move to Patronum from alternative SaaS Operations Management solutions such as BetterCloud. As a pure Google Workspace solution, we find that Patronum offers deeper integration with Google Workspace at an extremely competitive price. As a full management platform for Google Workspace, Patronum offers customers complete user lifecycle management helping organisations with the joiners, leavers and movers process. Helping securely streamline the onboarding of users, as well as significantly cut license creep, by correctly deactivating or archiving Google Workspace accounts, and freeing up valuable licenses.

Patronum features include:-

1. Complete On and Offboarding – Provisioning and deprovisioning users within Google Workspace can be time-consuming and costly. Patronum can fully automate all the administrator and user tasks to ensure an effective and secure process.
2. Email Signature Management – Patronum Google email signature management gives users a consistent and dynamic Google Workspace Gmail email signature.
3. Google Drive Management – Help users better manage their Google Drive with the Patronum Google Drive explorer. Change permissions and ownership of Google Drive on demand and via a policy. Find who has access to your Google Drive data both internally and externally.
4. Organisational Chart – Provide users with an internal directory based on the information you already have within your Google Workspace environment. Search for users by location, skills, job title and other keywords.
5. Experts on Hand – With Patronum support is free, simply contact a Patronum team member via the build in chat and video calling service. Get answers to your questions right where and when you need them. No messing about with ping pong email support.

If you’re interested in learning more about Patronum get in touch and arrange for a one on one demo.