Deleting iPhone Contacts

One of the side benefits of writing blog posts is that over time you create your own knowledge base that you can refer to. I know I am not alone when I say that there have been countless occasions where although I seem to recall having implemented a particular solution in the past... only to struggle to figure out exactly where, when and how it was performed. My experience is that once you have blogged about a topic, it is much more likely to be registered to long term memory which when combined with the power of search... voila! I guess blogging is an example of the proverb: "You never really own something until you're able to give it away" (Bill Nichols).

In light of that long-winded intro...

As part of rolling out the Outlook client functionality to end users we needed to of course clean up existing contacts so that duplicate contact records are not created when syncing from CRM.

In most cases, this is just a matter of cleaning up your Outlook contacts because Outlook contacts sync to the various mobile apps so cleaning up in Outlook results in a clean up everywhere else.

We were however presented with a case where the contacts were stored directly on the iPhone and we needed to get rid of these. Given that various users had thousands of contacts going through the list was not really an option.

Fortunately we were able to purchase a very inexpensive iPhone app in order to solve the problem. The app name is Contacts In : Import CSV & Manage Groups. Steps:

Select All Contacts:

 Click Action menu and choose "Delete contacts":