Extracting Exchange Contacts from iPhone

Last week I was helping an individual migrate information over from his old company to his new company. As he no longer had physical access to the company computers, but still had Exchange access until the end of the month, one would have thought it a relatively trivial task. Quite the contrary. Though he had access to his information via Outlook Web Access and his iPhone, he did not have a personal copy of Outlook, so using Outlook to export information was out of the question. OWA also does not allow you to export contact information, and instead presents them in an HTML page. After a number of attempts to extract the contact information via iTunes, I started looking at alternative means. At this point I discovered Air Contacts.

Air Contacts is a great app. It essentially sets up a localized webserver, and presents all your contact information (no matter the source) in a simple, MobileMe-esque interface. You can browse individual contacts, with an option at the bottom of each contact item to export a vCard. At the top of the web interface there is an option to export all contacts. This page in turn has options to export a zip file with the information, a Windows formatted vCard, a Mac vCard, or an iPhone contact backup vCard. It is a very well thought out design.

I initially ran into a bug with contact export crashing the app. After contacting the developer and submitting the crash logs, it was determined that some malformed contact image data wasn’t being handled properly. A few hours later the developer sent me an updated test application to see if he’d fixed the issue. After running the test app, I can safely say that the problem is fixed. Once the updated version hits the App Store (v1.7), I highly recommend this app to anyone looking for an easy way to extract their old Exchange contact information from their iPhone.

Overall, I give this app a 4/5. This app serves its purpose very well. Had it not been for the bug I ran into, this would have been 5/5.

You can view the developer’s website at http://www.apptism.com/apps/air-contacts and purchase it on the iPhone App Store for $1.99.

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Tags: Air Contacts, Exchange, iPhone