Manage the shared contact directory

Build the contact list that appears on the desk phones, import it from a spreadsheet, and push updates to the phones.

The contact directory is one shared address book per phone system. It appears on the desk phones under DIRECTORY, so staff can look up a supplier or a regular customer and dial from the handset instead of retyping a number. Contacts are optionally organized into groups, which become the group labels on the phone; anything without a group shows under Ungrouped.

Open Settings, then Contacts. The page hides itself from anyone whose role cannot manage contacts, so if you cannot find it, ask an administrator about your role.

A phone system holds at most 1,000 contacts. The page shows how many of them are in use, and the add controls turn off once the directory is full — delete a contact to make room for another.

Prerequisites

The intended phone system selected in the dashboard header. The directory belongs to one phone system.
A role that can manage contacts.
Provisioned desk phones if you want the directory to reach handsets.

Add a contact

Select New Contact, or + Contact inside the group you want it in.
Enter a Name — this is the label on the phone’s screen, up to 100 characters in the form.
Choose a Group, or leave it as No group (Ungrouped).
Fill in the numbers. Each contact carries up to three, and the positions are fixed because they map to the phone’s own fields:

Field Required On the phone

Office Yes Office number

Mobile No Mobile number

Other No Other number
Enter either a telephone number or a 2–6 digit internal extension in each field. Type an extension using digits only, with no embedded spaces or punctuation. Office is still required.
Watch the hint under each entry. A recognized telephone number shows the canonical form it will be saved as, such as +14155551234. An extension stays exactly as entered after surrounding spaces are removed, so 001234 keeps its leading zeroes, and the preview labels it as an extension. Anything unrecognized shows the reason instead and blocks the save. Telephone entries can be a 10-digit North American number, an 11-digit number starting with 1, or a full international number beginning with +.
Choose a Ring Tone if calls from this contact should ring differently. Phone default keeps each phone’s own ringtone; Ring 1 to Ring 8 are the tones built into the desk phones. T3-series phones (T31G and T33G) have only Ring 1 to Ring 4.
Select Add Contact.

Field	Required	On the phone
Office	Yes	Office number
Mobile	No	Mobile number
Other	No	Other number

Editing works the same way — open Edit on the row. Clearing a number also clears its label, and a contact always keeps at least the Office entry. Editing the name or group does not rewrite an existing extension. The Ring Tone shows the saved choice; setting it back to Phone default removes the contact’s ringtone, and the phones return to their own ring on their next refresh.

Organize contacts into groups

New Group creates a group. The name is what appears as the group label on the phone, so keep it short and avoid line breaks, leading or trailing spaces, and other control characters — those are rejected. Group names must be unique within the phone system.
Rename changes the label everywhere it appears.
Delete group removes only the grouping. The contacts inside it survive and move to Ungrouped.

Import contacts from a spreadsheet

Importing is the fastest way to seed a directory, and it is a review-then-commit flow rather than a blind upload.

Select Import.
Fill in the sheet, one contact per row, in the column order Name, Office, Mobile, Other, Group. Type into the cells, or copy cells from Excel or Google Sheets and paste them into the sheet — the paste fills down and across from the cell you start in, and the sheet grows as needed (+ Add 10 rows adds more by hand). Office is required; the rest are optional. Complete US and Canada phone entries snap to (415) 555-0100 as you type or paste. In the Group column, pick an existing group from the list; a pasted name that does not exist yet is marked “(new)” and created for you on import. Paste contact rows only — a copied header row lands as an ordinary row and shows as blocked in the preview. Up to 255 rows per import, and the import is refused outright if the new contacts in it would take the directory past 1,000. Rows that update an existing contact do not count toward that, so a full directory can still be bulk-updated.
Select Next to see the preview. Every row gets a status: New contact, Will update when the name matches a contact you already have, or Blocked with the reason. A group that does not exist yet is flagged as a new group and created for you.
Go Back and fix or clear every blocked row — the import stays disabled while any row is blocked, so nothing is written from a partly valid paste. Select a row’s cells and press Delete to clear it.
Select Import. The summary reports how many contacts were created and updated, and how many groups were added.

Matching is by contact name, case-insensitively, so an import is also the way to bulk-update existing entries: keep the names identical and change the dial strings. Office, Mobile, and Other cells accept 10 telephone digits, 11 telephone digits starting with 1, or a 2–6 digit internal extension. The preview shows extensions literally, including leading zeroes, and labels them as extensions before you commit the import. Other formats are blocked rather than guessed at.

Push the directory to the phones

Contact changes do not appear on the handsets the instant you save. Select Refresh phones to push the current directory to every registered phone in this phone system. The result tells you how many phones were refreshed and how many did not respond; phones that miss the push pick the directory up on their own refresh cycle. Phones that are unplugged or unregistered are not counted. A changed ringtone travels with the directory, so it follows the same Refresh phones step and plays only once a phone has picked up the new list.

Remove contacts

Delete one contact from its row’s delete action.
Select the checkboxes — or a section’s header checkbox — and use Delete selected to remove several at once.

Either way the delete asks you to confirm first. Some accounts see a review: it names the phone system, lists the contacts it would delete — the first 25 by name, counting any more — flags anything blocking the delete, and shows when the review expires. Confirming runs exactly that review — an expired review, or one whose contacts changed since it was prepared, is refreshed and must be checked again before it can be confirmed. Other accounts confirm a plain prompt naming the contact or the count. This cannot be undone.

Expected result

The page lists every contact under Ungrouped or its group with the Office, Mobile, and Other entries. Telephone numbers appear in readable form, while internal extensions appear literally, including leading zeroes. After a refresh, the same names, groups, and dial strings appear on the desk phones’ DIRECTORY screen.

Troubleshooting

The Contacts page is not in the navigation: Your role cannot manage contacts. The dashboard hides the section rather than showing an area you cannot use.
A dial string will not save: The hint under the field names the problem. Use a 10-digit North American number, an 11-digit number starting with 1, a full international number starting with +, or an internal extension made of 2–6 digits only. One-digit and seven-or-more-digit values are not extensions, and extension entries cannot contain letters, embedded spaces, or punctuation.
A group name is rejected: Remove line breaks, leading or trailing spaces, and any unusual characters, and check that no other group already uses the name.
Import will not start: At least one row is blocked, or the sheet holds more than 255 filled rows. The preview either explains a batch limit or names the reason on each blocked row; common ones are a missing or malformed Office number, a duplicated name inside the same sheet, a name that matches more than one existing contact, and a name or group that starts with =, +, -, @, or | — spreadsheet formula characters are refused.
An import that previewed cleanly fails on submit: Someone changed the directory while you were reviewing. The rows that now conflict are re-flagged in the preview — recheck and retry.
Add Contact is greyed out, or an import will not start on a contact limit: The directory holds 1,000 contacts, its maximum. Delete contacts you no longer need before adding more. An import that only updates existing contacts still runs at the limit — you need to free space only for the rows that add new ones.
The contact add, edit, and delete controls are greyed out, or a banner says changes are paused or unavailable: The dashboard checks what you may change before it enables those controls — while the check is running or has failed, they stay off and Retry checks again. When contact changes are temporarily switched off, importing and group actions still work.
The page says contacts are not available right now: Contact management is not being offered for your account in this phone system at the moment — separate from a load error, which shows its own Retry. Select Retry, and contact support if the state persists.
A notice says a change has not been confirmed yet: A contact change that lost its answer — the page reloaded or you navigated away in the same tab before it finished — is never sent again; a status notice appears instead. Closing the tab clears the recovery record, so keep the tab open while a change is being saved. Select Check status rather than re-entering the change, which may already be saved. Other contact add, edit, and delete actions pause until it resolves; imports and group actions remain available. A change left unconfirmed in one phone system pauses those same actions in the others until you open that phone system and check it. A notice that cannot show the outcome lists an operation ID — or a retry key when no ID was assigned — Dismiss clears it, and support can trace the change by that reference.
A change was not sent because the browser could not keep track of it: Allow site storage for the dashboard and try again — the change is refused rather than sent untracked.
A phone still shows the old list: Run Refresh phones again and confirm the phone is registered. A handset that is offline picks up the change when it next refreshes.
The contact still rings with the default tone: Run Refresh phones so the handsets load the directory with the new ringtone. The phone matches the caller’s number to the contact’s numbers, so check that the contact holds the number the call arrives from — an inbound display rule that changes the number the phone sees breaks that match. T3-series phones (T31G and T33G) have only Ring 1 to Ring 4.
The directory looks wrong after switching shops: Each phone system has its own directory. Check the phone-system name in the header.