Robin,
I'll tell you what I do to manage and sync my contacts across my computer and my iPhone. Be aware that this is what works best for me but that doesn't make it the best practices. First of all, I need to say that I'm not a huge fan of doing everything through the cloud. I do love Dropbox and the access it has with all the apps I use to make sharing across devices much easier. But I don't use Apple's iCloud for purposes of syncing contact and other information between my iPhone and my desktop computer. I've been using Outlook on my home computer to read my emails and manage my contacts and calendar and still prefer to use Outlook on my home computer as my primary input of contact information. It then syncs quite nicely with my iPhone via iTunes to transfer contact and calendar info to my iPhone. On the rare occasions I've needed to add contact info while traveling with only my iPhone, anything I've entered that way syncs back to Outlook on my home computer quite nicely. If you later leave your work, I'd suggest you invest in a version of Microsoft Office that includes Outlook and runs on your home computer. I have a gmail account which is set up as POP3 on my desktop computer and as IMAP on my iPhone. This way, I can download the email to my home computer in the same fashion I've always done it. I have gmail set to archive any email downloaded this way so I always have access via my iPhone to check all mail and review any email that way. I have about 15GB of space Google is giving me for free so it will hold a lot of archived email. As I said earlier, this works best for me but there are many practices to do what you want and you'll have to experiment to learn what works best for you. Good luck. Alan Lemly From: viphone@googlegroups.com [mailto:viphone@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of R Van Lant Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2016 12:16 PM To: viphone@googlegroups.com Subject: best practices for managing contacts across iphone and laptops Curious for best practices with managing and synching contacts across my iPhone and windows based computers where I use Outlook to read mail and manage email contacts. Until now, I would occasionally add phone numbers to my phone directly. After I started including my work Outlook account on my phone, my work contact would be visible, so I found it easier to add and edit contacts on my work laptop in Outlook knowing they would show up in my phone. This is great until the day that I no longer work at my company -- which I am not currently planning. Before my home laptop died this summer, I had personal contacts in Outlook on my home computer, but only used that for capturing emails. When my laptop died, I had to have my iPhone pull in my Hotmail contacts so that I could reach people. Now I see that I have cases where I had entered a phone number in my phone, but there is a second entry in Contacts from where an email address pulls in from Hotmail. If I combine those two in my phone, does that mean that I would no longer have access to the email address from Outlook on my personal computer? Or, is the best practiced to go back and move the phone number entry into the entry that comes over from Hotmail so that I maintain the entry in places via the Hotmail link to my iPhone? If the recommendation is to always enter new contacts on the laptop, what do you do when you are on the go and have a new phone number to add? Robin -- The following information is important for all members of the V iPhone list. 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If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your V iPhone list moderator is Mark Taylor and your owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at caraqu...@caraquinn.com The archives for this list can be searched at: http://www.mail-archive.com/viphone@googlegroups.com/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "VIPhone" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to viphone@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/viphone. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
