This is unfinished project intended to be a tool to synchronise LinkedIn contacts and Gmail addressbook. Still it has been useful for me to experiment with OAuth and MongoDB.
The original design is explained below:
(by Paolo Predonzani, originally posted on March 24, 2018)
Have you ever looked up an email or a phone number of one of your connections on LinkedIn? I have, especially in these situation:
- I have met somebody at a conference or meeting. We have connected on LinkedIn and now I want to write an email to the person;
- A friend has moved to a new job. I have the friend's old contacts in my address book and now I want to update them with the new contacts from LinkedIn.
I use Gmail's address book all the time and LinkedIn occasionally. It would be nice if I could synchronise the contacts between the two. It would be nice if there was a simple, open source tool to do that!
To address this problem, I'm starting a new project on Github called Contacts-sync: https://github.com/softwareloop/contacts-sync
It has little code at the moment but in this blog post I'd like to share some initial design thoughts.
Visually, contacts will be presented as cards.
Contacts-sync will present Gmail and LinkedIn cards next to each other, in a way that makes it clear which contact on Gmail is associated to which contact on LinkedIn.
The association between Gmail and LinkedIn cards will be missing sometimes. There will be Gmail cards without corresponding LinkedIn cards and vice versa.
There will also be cases where the cards for a person are present both on Gmail and LinkedIn but for some reason (different name spelling or lack/mismatch of other common attributes) the two cards are not associated.
Contacts-sync will help reconcile these situations.
Finally, when a pair of Gmail/LinkedIn cards is allocaited, there may be different values for emails, phone numbers and other attributes. Contacts-sync will highlight the situation to the user and help reconcile (sync) the differences.
In general, contact details will be sync'ed from the LinkedIn card to the Gmail card (and not the other way round), as a consequence of the fact that LinkedIn contacts are public and read-only while the Gmail address book is personal and read/write.
Contacts-sync will be a Java webapp to be installed locally or on a server.
The backend will include Spring Boot and optionally MongoDB for storage.
The frontend will includes Angular.js and Material Design Lite.
This webapp will rely on Oauth2 to authorise the exchange of data with Gmail and LinkedIn. Some setup will be required and will be documented when the project is more mature..
True. LinkedIn even has it's own tool and mobile app to do it, but they sync in the wrong direction: from Gmail to LinkedIn. I'd like them to work the other way round.
There are also other commercial tools to sync contacts, but are closed sources, cannot be customised, and there can be privacy concerns about them.
I think creating an open source tool is the way to go. I also think that contact sync'ing is quite a generic requirement across different address books, social networks and intranet services. With some tweaking and extension, Contacts-sync can be the foundation to address those diverse situations.
I have also looked for similar open source tools, specifically in Java, but found none. If you're aware of any, let me know and I'll be glad to reference them.
This blog post is just the announcement of this new project, which will hopefully be useful to a lot of people.