We’ve published our internal tool as a micro site
Most of our time at CloudSponge is spent on two main activities: keeping track of all supported address book sources (they changes a lot!) and working to build support for new ones. Just this year, we’ve added support to the following new address books: Office365, Mail.ru, Rediff, 126.com, 163.com, Yeah.net, GMX, QIP.ru, Sapo, Mail.com, Yandex, QQ, O2.pl, Web.de and Naver.
Of course, to make sure they work properly in all cases we have to run a LOT of tests. To prepare for the edge cases, we’ve generated some special address books (some huge ones, some ones using weird encoding, etc.). To properly accomplish these tests, we often need to migrate a test address book from one platform to another. And, for this case, the universal address book format is CSV.
Internally, we were eating our own dog food for this task and using our own custom-built widget to export contacts to CSV.
Why an external tool?
Jay (our CEO) is constantly sending me great articles and books to read (I just love this!), and one of latest articles was Engineering-as-marketing: How startups transform marketing. One of the greatest points of the article describes how engineers can help their company directly by building tools and resources that our useful for your audience.
While reading the “Micro Sites”” topic, I realized that our internal “Export Contacts to CSV” tool was the perfect candidate to publish as an external site! For sure, exporting contacts from any source to CSV is something useful for anyone. I’d bet you have already had to export your desktop contacts to Google or vice-versa!
Then, voilà, it’s why we’ve built ExportMyContacts.com, where anyone can export contacts from any source to a CSV file. As a micro site, we tried to keep it minimal and simple to use: only links to the sources and a textarea to copy the generated CSV output.
Additionally, it’s open source, of course!
I really hope the tool is useful for you as it’s for our team!
