Zulu

Phone Fax Email

Note: Zulu's Contact Sync is Back in Beta

Regretfully, we've just never been able to get the contact sync in Zulu to be reliable with Google Contacts. Some of this is that Google Contacts is changing and some if that contacts are inherently more complicated than calendar events (the calendar sync in Zulu is rock solid). So until we can get this rock solid we're demoting the contact sync to Beta and no longer supporting it.

We'll continue playing with this here but won't be able to help customers try and get it working: it just isn't reliable enough. At this point we don't have an ETA as to when this feature may be available again, if ever. Believe me, we wanted this to work as bad as you did. Dec 27, 2012.

How Does Zulu Map Related Phone Numbers and Emails?

Zulu knows that you may have phone numbers, for example, IN your contacts record, or in a related table. Or both. And Zulu handles phone, email, and physical addresses the same way: you can have some of these fields IN your contacts table, or store them in a related table.

Here is how it works:

Phone Numbers.

You can map up to three phone fields IN your contacts record. If you have phone numbers in a related table, you can map that instead of or in addition to the local fields. If you have both, Zulu will use the locally mapped fields in the contact's record first, then the related fields.

Example: you have 1 main phone number field in your contact's record, then a table of additional phone numbers. You create a new contact on your iPhone with 5 phone numbers. When this contact is synced to FileMaker, the first phone entered will go into the main field in the contacts record, and the 4 additional phones will be added as related records.

Email Addresses.

Work exactly like phones: you can map up to three IN the contact's record, and then map a related table.

Fax Numbers.

You may only map 1 local fax number. Same with URLS: one local field only. Note that you can, of course label some of your other mapped phones as faxes or label email addresses as URLs. In this way you can have as many as you want, but Zulu will only send one fax and one URL to the dedicated fax / url fields in Google.

Physical Addresses.

Work just like phones and emails except that you may only map 1 address locally, the others can be mapped to your related address table.

• Country Codes Google only supports two digit Country Codes in Contact address information. Please make sure you map a field with these codes rather than the Country name. Attempting to sync with a full Country name will cause a syncing error.

Notes about related records

Even though FileMaker can make use of related records for phones, emails and addresses, Google can not. There is just a single Contact record in Google, so related information in FileMaker is written to the single Contact record in Google, and in the process any additional information in the related records is lost. To deal with this, Zulu needs to delete and rewrite the related records in FileMaker if they are edited in Google. Since they are being rewritten, any information not stored in one of the Google fields will be lost. This includes the primary key of the related record, and can present some limitations for certain data models.

Notes about Phone, Email, and Address Labels

Google can be finicky about what it accepts as a valid Phone or Email label. For example if I have a related table of phone numbers in FileMaker and I create a new one with the label "Sally", that phone record won't show up in Google when I sync.

However, if I first label it "Work" and then after it has been synced I change the label to "Sally" that label will be moved up to Google.

It seems Google wants labels to begin with one of a few words: the label "Work Sally" is accepted where "Sally" is not. So it is best practice to begin your labels with one of the following words: work, home, mobile, pager, other, car.

You should also check out the limitations Google has when syncing this phone, fax, and email data to iPhones and iPads: Google Limitations.