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Region Specific Technical / Service Provider Support => North America - Including Google Voice, Skype, etc. => Topic started by: giqcass on December 28, 2013, 12:43:21 AM

Title: Custom CNAM on Callcentric.
Post by: giqcass on December 28, 2013, 12:43:21 AM
I have decided to add my entire phonebook to Callcentric.  The task is a little more daunting then I had hoped.  First I exported my contacts from Google Contacts to a CSV file.  Then I had to add a leading , to every contact.  I had to erase notes, secondary phone numbers addresses and some other extraneous info Callcentric did not support.  I had to delete extra , from the file and ;.  Much of this was accomplished through search and replace functions in text edit.  I created a rule that anyone in my phonebook would ring directly through to my extensions.  The primary benefit of going to all this trouble is that all of my contacts will now appear with custom CNAM on my home phone. This feature is quite useful considering cell phones are not listed in CNAM databases.  I have heard many people are having trouble with CNAM on Callcentric so hopefully this is also more reliable then the standard lookup process.  My contacts just over 100 covers more then 99% of the calls I wish to receive anyway.
Title: Re: Custom CNAM on Callcentric.
Post by: Lavarock7 on December 28, 2013, 02:00:53 PM
When you say "erase" I assume that you did not just load the .csv file into a spread sheet program like excel or Open Office?

If you choose the delimiter correctly, each section of info comes up in a separate column which you can then delete the column.

My credo is never do something manually when you can get the computer to do it. Sometimes it takes longer to figure out how to get the computer to do it, but that exercise makes it easier for the next time.

My other credo is never put off until tomorrow, what you can put off until the day after.

Title: Re: Custom CNAM on Callcentric.
Post by: giqcass on December 28, 2013, 07:44:10 PM
I used a series of "find and replace" commands to make the changes.  I erased extra fields by replacing them with nothing.  Your right, Excel would have been faster.  If I had imported the csv file into a spreadsheet I could have just deleted a few columns, added one, and combined two. Then export back to csv. I'm a big fan of excel for repetitive tasks because you can shove in a lot of automation with VB.  I created an awesome Excel setup for work that pulled data from another file, edited the data, checked for errors, printed multiple copies to two different printers, and then saved the new file plus a copy of the raw data with auto generated file names.  One click shopping! 
Title: Re: Custom CNAM on Callcentric.
Post by: dircom on February 27, 2014, 02:14:37 PM
I exported my CallCentric Phone book, added some numbers to it, saved as CSV
and get this error msg when I try and upload it
File type is not allowed (application/ms-excel)

??  its basically the same file I just downloaded
Title: Re: Custom CNAM on Callcentric.
Post by: giqcass on February 27, 2014, 05:45:12 PM
Sounds like you used Microsoft Office to open it. It probably changed the headers of the file.(Stuff you can't see)
Create a new text file with the text edit application.  Then copy the contents of the modified text file and paste  them  into the new file.  Then make sure you save it as a plain text file.
Title: Re: Custom CNAM on Callcentric.
Post by: dircom on February 27, 2014, 06:23:06 PM
Callcentric says "CSV files can easily be created with Microsoft Excel"
you can save csv files in Excel.

What application are you suggesting to use?  I originally opened in Excel, and saved as CSV
then I tried Notepad ++, and still get same error msg
Title: Re: Custom CNAM on Callcentric.
Post by: giqcass on February 27, 2014, 06:49:49 PM
Unfortunately my computer with Excel tanked so I can't look it right now. Excel should have an option to export as CSV just make sure it's saving it as plain text without extra meta data or formatting.  To do what I talked about about above something like notepad should work.
Title: Re: Custom CNAM on Callcentric.
Post by: SteveInWA on February 27, 2014, 07:51:35 PM
This is one of my pet peeves about the utter failure of Microsoft, Google, and any other company that provides or makes use of contacts databases to have cooperated as an industry to fully support vCard or some better tool.  Don't even get me started about calendar interoperability.  The absolute worst is Outlook.  There isn't even a good tool to move between Outlook and MS' own Hotmail/Live Mail/Outlook.com!  The third-party solutions over the years have really sucked, too.  Every few years, MS would change Outlook, and that would wreck the converters.

Early on, as a CC customer, I tried to export my MS Outlook.com or Gmail contacts into something I could import into CC.  CC's tool is so wretchedly limited as to be useless.  It took so much time in Excel massaging and exporting as CSV, then trying to import into CC, that I gave up.  I am no Excel automation guru, but somebody could write the appropriate automation with Excel to do the massaging.  Without automation, it's pointless, because as soon as a few contacts change, you have to update in both places.

Tip: if anyone who is an Excel wizard wants to mess with this, first manually enter some contacts into CC's list, then export it to CSV, so at least you have the specific columnar format CC expects.

My pipe-dream:  CC or some other ITSP simply uses Google's API to access my contacts directly, and either do a manual import, or ...imagine this... automatically update on a scheduled basis.  In the 1990s, this was called "CTI", or Computer Telephony Integration.  We can only dream, or all spend big bucks to buy Microsoft Lync.
Title: Re: Custom CNAM on Callcentric.
Post by: dircom on February 28, 2014, 06:11:36 AM
When I open a CC phone book export in Notepad ++ an entry looks like this

,"Ebay Resolution Center",18015451800,FinancialCRLF

(when I open in Excel, yes the first column is empty)
(Financial is just a group I have in my CC Phn book)
Title: Re: Custom CNAM on Callcentric.
Post by: giqcass on February 28, 2014, 11:16:18 AM
Quote from: dircom on February 28, 2014, 06:11:36 AM
CRLF

That is code for a break.  Perhaps a simple replace all will fix it.