Contact management in Team is inadequate and frustrating. The process of managing contacts and organizations and adding them to projects is not transparent or easily understood.
We need a central contact directory beyond what is offered by Admin Center > User Management. This contact directory should be maintained at the enterprise level and should contain all of our contact organizations and the individual users within those organizations. The current User Management page does not show the user's organization or any contact information beyond an email address. It's not until they are finally added to a project that we can see all of their relevant contact info. It also appears that if we've ever mistakenly invited someone to Team using the wrong email address, that dummy user appears stuck in user management forever with a link to Resend Invitation.
The way it stands, when adding a contact to a project, you may or may not be able to search for the person you're looking. I believe after searching Clearview that this is an intentional behavior (https://teamdocs.viewpoint.com/topics/Contacts/t_add_an_existing_contact_to_a_project.html). If the contact does NOT have a Team user account, you can search for them by name, email, or organization, or navigate through the alphanumeric directory. If the contact DOES have a Team user account, you CANNOT search for them in this directory. They have to be added by explicitly entering their email address, which you have to look up from somewhere else. Just stop and think about that for a second from the perspective of a user. It makes no sense. If we've previously added them to a project, invited them to Team, and they've created a Team user account, it's now MORE difficult to add them to a project, not less. And once they've created a Team user account, there is nowhere within Team to look them up in a way that shows all of their contact info until after you've added them to a project.
Presumably, Team requires us to add Team users explicitly by email address because that is the unique identifier for a Team user. Why not, however, just have one enterprise-level directory with active Team users and other contacts alike? Then, when adding a contact to a job, we can search through anyone in our directory and have one place to look through all of our contacts. We left Procore for Team because we are implementing Spectrum for accounting and want to have an integrated solution. We knew Team was not as developed as Procore when making the switch, and we were willing to live without some of the Procore features we'd be losing. We never anticipated though that contact management would be so underdeveloped. Creating a company-wide directory seems like one of the first logical steps in creating a project collaboration software, so I'm surprised the product has come along this far without it. Everyone in our organization whom has had to go through manually entering everyone's exact email address when creating a new job has been dumbfounded and frustrated by the process.
I'm sure there are plenty of good feature-specific suggestions out there for improving contact management. What I'm suggesting is needed, though, is rethinking the logic of contact management in Team. We need an enterprise-level directory that provides visibility and ease in adding contacts to projects and managing permissions.
Tim Reddick
| Company | Urban Sites Construction |
| Job Title / Role | Accounting Manager |
| I need it... | Yesterday...Come on already |
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The second issue is that a contact's organization is determined by the corresponding Vista Contact's PM Firm name when they are first added to Team. So if changes are made to the PM Firm name in Vista after, it will continue to be added as it was the first time. If the contact's email address matches a contact in PM Firms, it should pull the current PM Firm name as the organization name. It would be great if the Organization Name could be updated across all contacts automatically if the PM Firm name changes. That way all of our contacts would be up to date in Team without having to update each contact manually.
Right now, when we add a new user from VIsta, their first name and last name is being set to "First Name" and l"Last Name" rather than the information that already exists. Then, when a user goes to add the contact to the project, they only see an email address and not the actual first and last name of the contact. This can be confusing!
Yes. Big push coming up in contacts and one of the first aspects to this will be to create an enterprise address book - so you are primarily dealing with those contacts in your own enterprise.
I agree. We need a central location for contacts. I would love to be able to go to a central contacts location and select users and push them into several jobs at once. Both internal AND external.