Contacts in contact menu needs to be merged

[LukasReschke]

I do have many people multiple times because I do have them as local user account but also as part of the contacts app, we do need some deduplication happening here.

[ChristophWurst]

Makes sense. Still, this might be tricky depending on the strategy. Do we have anything the uniquely identifies a contact entry?

[jancborchardt]

Well … I’m still saying that some form of data sharing between the users management and Contacts app would be useful to fix this and get rid of our many notions of users.

This is not something to be tacked on in the Contacts menu, and share menu, and Mail app, and all the other autocomplete functions.

cc @karlitschek @daita @Henni @irgendwie @skjnldsv @icewind1991

[rullzer]

Merging contacts is far from easy. And can often be wrong if you are on a large installation. There is currently no easy way to (reliably) determine that userX (a user on the system) is the same userX some people might have in their contacts.

Also (again large installations) sharing all the system contacts to the users addressbook doesn't seem like a solution.

[bjornnorman]

Haven't had time to check the code, but isn't there a chance both userX and the contact are registered with the same email address? If so, at least those matches could - with an acceptable degree of confidence - be merged in the list...?

[nickvergessen]

Also by cloud-id?

[MorrisJobke]

I guess this is out of scope for 12, right?

[ChristophWurst]

I guess this is out of scope for 12, right?

Yes.

[jancborchardt]

I set it to 13 hence.

The points by @bjornnorman and @nickvergessen to merge based on email address and cloud-id are good. Additionally we now have the phone number, twitter handle and address in the personal settings, so it’s actually more and more which can overlap and be used as factors to merge on. cc @schiessle

[skjnldsv]

Merging contacts is far from easy. And can often be wrong if you are on a large installation. There is currently no easy way to (reliably) determine that userX (a user on the system) is the same userX some people might have in their contacts.

The Jaro Winkler algorithm is the answer! ;)

But this only does the name. We need more data to really be ok to fusion contacts. :)

[Arvi89]

Hello,

If merging is not easy, why not do like mobile phone ? An option to merge contacts, but here that would be to merge contact with a cloud user. In the contact profile, add an option where we can search for a cloud user to merge with.