MSPs managing multiple M365 tenants - how do you handle contact sync for clients?
Hey fellow MSP folks,
Need advice: We manage about 40 M365 tenants for small-to-mid businesses (20-300 seats each). One pain point that keeps coming up across our client base: employees want company contacts and shared calendars on their phones, but the clients don't want to pay for complicated MDM rollouts just for contacts.
Right now our playbook is basically:
- Tell users to add the Exchange account to their phone
- Hope the GAL magically appears (spoiler: it doesn't, not really)
- Field tickets about "why can't I see so-and-so's number?"
- Walk users through manually adding contacts one by one
It's not scalable and the user experience is garbage. We have construction clients where field crews NEED up-to-date sub and vendor contacts on their phones for safety/liability reasons. We have law firms where partners want client contacts from their CRM synced to caller ID. We have healthcare clients with on-call rotation calendars that never reliably show up on mobile.
I'm looking for a solution we can deploy tenant-by-tenant that:
- Works with M365 Exchange Online (and ideally Google Workspace too)
- Lets us push GAL + shared contact folders to phones centrally
- Doesn't require end users to download or configure anything
- Can sync shared calendars reliably to native phone calendar apps
- Is MSP-friendly (multi-tenant or at least easy to replicate across clients)
What are you using? Or are you just eating the support tickets and calling it "managed services"? :D
Would love to hear what's actually working in production vs. what vendors claim on their websites.