Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at 📇 Contacts.

Nextcloud Contacts is our shared address book, and it’s the single source of truth for client and vendor data across the team. It supports CardDAV, which means your contacts can sync automatically to your phone, tablet, or Outlook — wherever you manage your address book day to day.

Let’s talk about what the Contacts app actually does for you. First, you get shared address books, so the whole team is working from the same up-to-date records rather than scattered personal lists. You can store custom fields too — things like deal stage, company name, and phone numbers that make it useful as a lightweight CRM. Contacts can be organised into groups, which makes it easy to filter and find who you need. And when it comes to getting data in or out, you can import and export using VCF or CSV formats.

Now, NZRT has four main contact groups set up. The first is Clients, which is maintained by the pam and cas agents and holds the customer database. The second is Vendors, looked after by sun and fin, covering all supplier contacts. Third is Employees — that’s the internal directory, maintained by han and xc. And fourth is Partners, which xc manages, covering integrations and external service providers.

One of the most important things to understand about Contacts is how it connects to Dolibarr, our ERP system. There are two ways this works. The first is an automated sync — Nextcloud Contacts and Dolibarr customers and suppliers are linked through the REST API, and a nightly task keeps them in step. So changes made in one place flow through to the other overnight. The second method is manual — you can download a CSV from Contacts and import it directly into the Dolibarr CRM. That’s useful for one-off bulk updates or when you need more control over what gets synced and when.

If you want to set up CardDAV on your mobile device, here’s how that works on iOS. You go into Settings, then Accounts, and add a new CardDAV account. The server address is your Nextcloud instance, and you log in with your LDAP username. Once that’s connected, your Nextcloud contacts will appear right alongside your regular phone contacts and stay in sync automatically.

Finally, a quick note on who owns what. The pam agent handles products, cas handles sales, and sun handles procurement. All three of them maintain contact records in Nextcloud, and those records sync through to Dolibarr where they’re used for invoicing and order management. So if you’re ever wondering where the authoritative version of a client or vendor record lives, it starts here in Contacts.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.