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Considerations for Syncing Contacts
Familiarize yourself with these considerations for syncing contacts with Lightning Sync.
Required Editions
| Available to sync records from: Salesforce Classic, Lightning Experience, and the Salesforce mobile app |
| Available to set up from: Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Lightning Platform |
- Contact sync isn’t supported for Lightning Sync customers working from the user license Lightning Platform - One App. Lightning Platform - One App doesn’t include the Contacts object.
- Lightning Sync can sync up to 50,000 contacts per user. If you have more than 50,000 contacts assigned to you, an additional nonsyncing contact is picked up for sync only when one of the 50,000 stops syncing. A contact stops syncing if you delete a contact in Salesforce or your Microsoft or Google application, or if a contact sync issue occurs.
- Sometimes Lightning Sync can’t match a Salesforce account to a contact synced from Microsoft or Google. In that case, Lightning Sync lists partial matches on the Unresolved Items page in users’ Personal Settings. For users who sync both ways, if the next sync cycle occurs before the user manually relates a Salesforce account, the company is removed from the Microsoft or Google contact. To prevent this issue, we recommend that admins create Salesforce accounts that map to Microsoft or Google companies before rolling out contact sync to users. That way, when contacts with companies sync from Microsoft or Google, Salesforce accounts match automatically.
- When users delete contacts from one calendar application, Lightning Sync doesn’t automatically remove those contacts from the other calendar application. Automatically removing contacts from Salesforce can impact your sales data. Rather than deleting the contact in Salesforce, we recommend that reps update the Contact Status field to indicate when a contact has left a company, is deceased, and so forth.
- If contacts are regularly taking longer than a few minutes to sync, admins can reduce wait times by limiting the number of syncing contacts. On sync configuration datasets, from the contact filter Sync option, select Selected Contacts, instead of All Contacts. Doing so syncs only contacts that a user owns, rather than all contacts in Salesforce that a user can see.
- If a change you made in Salesforce didn’t sync to your external contact application, you
could have experienced a sync conflict. Sync conflicts can occur when at least one of these
conditions is true.
- You’re set up to sync contacts both ways
- You, another user with access, or an automated action updates the contact in your external application and Salesforce before Lightning Sync syncs the change
- If you’ve added custom fields to your Salesforce contacts, Lightning Sync doesn’t sync those fields between Salesforce and your Microsoft or Google application. But when matching records between Salesforce and your Microsoft or Google application, Lightning Sync considers custom email fields on Salesforce records when Shield Platform Encryption is applied to some standard fields. See the next bullet.
- Lightning Sync is supported when Shield Platform Encryption is enabled on any Salesforce object or field. But if you encrypt the Email field on the User object, the User Email field is duplicated in the Salesforce database when users are added to sync configurations that sync contacts or events. Even when the User Email field is encrypted using Shield Platform Encryption, this duplicate field stores user emails in the Salesforce database in an unencrypted state. When Shield Platform Encryption is turned on, Lightning Sync matching behavior is modified. Normally, Lightning Sync matches contacts between Salesforce and your Microsoft or Google application using the same standard Salesforce fields. But when you encrypt the Email field on Salesforce contacts, Lightning Sync expands its search to any custom email field you’ve added to the Salesforce contact. Lightning Sync syncs the first matching email address it identifies, so contacts could be matched based on the standard Email field or the custom email field.
- Some contact sync features can be limited on Microsoft or Google mobile apps. For more details, check product documentation for those apps.
- Formula fields aren’t supported when setting filter conditions that contacts must meet to sync.
- Lightning Sync doesn’t support contact or event matching with alias email addresses. To make sure that contacts and events sync between applications, opt to add primary email addresses to contacts or events when possible.
- When creating contacts in your Google application, the Email field must include the standard label Work for the contact to sync. The Phone field must include one of the following standard labels for the phone number to sync: Home, Work, Other, Mobile, or Work Fax.
- Contact sync doesn’t support Outlook categories, so contacts labeled with a Salesforce_Sync category that don’t exist in a contacts subfolder of the same name don’t sync with Salesforce. To avoid this issue, disable contact categories and select the Salesforce_Sync folder for new contacts in Outlook. See EAC - New Contacts Created In Outlook with ‘Salesforce_Sync’ Category Do Not Sync to Salesforce.
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