How to sync Microsoft GAL (Global Address List) on Android and iOS mobile devices

Question

We use Office 365 in the organization and add employee contact information to the Exchange. All contact information of these employees can then be found in the GAL (Global Address List) in Outlook.

We want all this employee information to be available to all other employees on mobile devices, eg. when someone calls you from an organization to know who is calling you, and also when you need to call someone to have that information on your mobile device.

The solution I found included manually copying from GAL to contacts (https://www.slipstick.com/exchange/making-the-exchange-server-gal-portable/)

But unfortunately this is not a good solution when new employees arrive or certain employee contact details change.

The question is, how to automatically sync contacts from GAL to Android and iOS devices (without additional 3-party software)?

Answer 1

there is no solution integrated in Exchange. You need to use 3-party or to develop a script which copy GAL in each user contacts folder

Answer 2

Personally, we use Samsung Galaxy Phones in our environment and with Samsung Mail, the contact sync works well and if you do a search for a name in contacts, it also searches in the GAL

for Android, this is a good solution without need of an additional app. The Exchange is on-premise in our case