Quick, do you know what your significant others phone number is? Your best friends? Can you even remember the last time you actually dialed a phone number? As in pushed 7 or more buttons labelled with numbers in succession? It is amazing how quickly we’ve become reliant on speed dial, computers, and smart phones to store contact info for our family, friends and of course business associates. If you think back to simpler times, I bet each of us have our childhood friend’s, high school sweetheart’s or your family home’s phone number still memorized. Nowadays we expect access to our digital version of the little black book at all times and on any device we use. Daylite 4 aims to solve this problem with newly added CardDAV support.
If you are upgrading from Daylite 3, and especially if you were not a Daylite Touch user, it’s likely you had contacts stored in both Daylite and in the built in Address Book app on your Mac. When iCloud was introduced, contacts could no longer be sync’d with Daylite via Sync Services so the division between the two likely grew.
With Daylite 4 and CardDAV, you should now make Daylite the primary place to store your contacts, and setup all your devices, Mac, iPhone and iPad, to access them. Once configured, you’ll have full read and write abilities to all of your contacts using the built in apps on OS X and iOS, so features like Caller ID and email address autocompletion work like you’d expect, or even ask Siri to look up a client’s mailing address for you. Daylite does not sync with your iCloud contacts – instead we’ve built our own standards based contact server into Daylite Server, so you’ll have your own private cloud to access to all you contacts. The first step is moving your contacts into Daylite.
Getting your iCloud contacts into Daylite
If you are upgrading to Daylite 4 and had previously been dealing with both systems, you may have contacts that exist only in one place, or the other. As you’ll see later on, once configured, you can view one aggregate list of contacts from both iCloud and Daylite on your iPhone. Any data that you enter into a contact stored only in iCloud, can’t be sync’d back to Daylite if you were to modify it using the Phone app, for example. So any person related to your business in any way, should probably be stored on the Daylite side of the fence, so that when viewing that contact info in Daylite for Mac, you’ll have the latest contact info, including any changes you’ve made on your phone.
To start, we need to get any business related contacts out of your iCloud account and moved into Daylite. We’ll export from Address Book on the Mac using vCards and then import those vCards into Daylite.
In Address Book, we need to select the contacts you want to move over to Daylite. If you want to grab all of them, then looking at your All Contacts list, from the Edit menu, choose Select All, or Command-A. If you use the groups feature of Address Book and have divided up your contacts into personal and business, for example, click on the red bookmark icon to flip over to the groups list and select the group that contain the contacts you want to migrate in the left list. Then click on one of those contacts from the right list so you can then select them all and drag those contacts onto the Daylite icon in your Dock. Repeat this procedure for any other group of contacts that you want to incorporate in Daylite.
Scroll through your People list and make sure you’ve imported all of your key business contacts. If you have any duplicate records, holding down command on your keyboard, click both of them in the People list so each are highlighted in blue, and go to the Edit menu, and select Combine 2 People… A pane will slide down asking you to choose which record to prefer in case of a conflict. Choose the one that is more current, or has more complete information, and Daylite will merge the two together. Any fields that did conflict will be written to a note that will be linked to the new amalgamated contact record.
Configuring CardDAV access in Address Book
- Go to the Address Book menu, and select Preferences…
- Switch to the Accounts tab, and click on the plus icon to add a new account.
- Making sure CalDAV is chosen in the Account type, enter your Daylite username and password.
- In the Server address field, type: yourdomain.com:6185, replacing yourdomain.com with whatever domain name you have associated with your Daylite Server. Click Create.
- You will likely get a warning that it can’t verify the identity of your server. This is normal. Click on Show Certificate. Check the box labelled “Always trust Daylite CardDAV and CalDAV Server…” and then click Continue. You’ll be prompted for your Mac user account password and then choose Update Settings.
- Once the account has been created, select it in the left list and change the Description to something more human readable, like “Daylite”, for example.
Close the Preferences window and navigate back to the groups view. You should now see both iCloud and Daylite listed, with their groups as subheadings below, as well as All Contacts at the top. Choose All Contacts to see one combined list of everyone you know. If you are seeing duplicates here, you might have to go back and forth between your All Daylite and All iCloud lists, deleting your business contacts from your iCloud list. As always, anytime you are deleting any kind of data from your computer, make sure you have solid backups in place, just in case.
Configuring CardDAV access on iOS
To add your CardDAV account to your iPhone or iPad, open the Settings app and navigate to Mail, Contacts and Calendar.
- Tap Add Account… and then scroll down to choose Other.
- Under Contacts, select Add CardDAV Account in the Other server setup.
- Enter your Server as: yourdomain.com and your Daylite username and password. Change the description to “Daylite”. Tap Next.
- You will get a prompt saying it cannot connect using SSL. Tap Continue.
- You will get a prompt saying CardDAV account verification failed. Tap OK.
- Tap Save. You will get a warning asking if you’re sure. Tap Save.
- Tap the newly created Daylite (Contacts) account and navigate into Advanced Settings.
- Change the Port to 6188. Tap back to Daylite and then tap Done.
It should verify your account and take you back to the accounts list. If you want all new contacts to be created in Daylite, scroll down to the Contacts section and change your Default Account from iCloud to Daylite.
Exit Settings by clicking your Home button and go to either the Phone or Contacts apps. If you were viewing All iCloud contacts previously, tap the Groups button and you should now see Daylite account alongside your iCloud. Tap All Contacts to see one aggregated list of everyone you know. Any changes you make to contacts who live in your Daylite account will sync back to Daylite for Mac. Also, any contacts you delete from a CardDAV client will also be deleted from Daylite, but any accidental deletions can be reverted by going to the Window menu and selecting Trash, where Daylite maintains a history of all the records you’ve deleted.
As always, if you are having any difficulties in getting this set up, please contact our friendly support team via the Help Menu in Daylite, selecting Contact Support to request help from us.
