Dialpad builds contacts sync In two days with one engineer

Dialpad built full support for Gmail, Office 365, and all versions of Microsoft Exchange contacts in just two days with the help of the Nylas Contacts API

Dialpad, the leading business phone system and cloud VoIP provider, enables smarter business communications for sales reps, support agents, and more. 

The venture backed company (with notable investors including Andreessen Horowitz and GV/Google Ventures) has modernized the desk phone and brought it to the cloud by building a scalable, feature-rich platform their users love. Behind the company’s success is a high-powered and resourceful engineering team that practices agile development, and adopts modern trends to speed up development cycles.

Challenges:

Scoping for Gmail & Microsoft Contacts Sync raised red flags for technical maintenance

While scoping out how to best provide a seamless way for their customers to find and manage their contacts in one centralized location, Dialpad foresaw some technical concerns. Namely, the amount of maintenance and oversight required to build an in-house solution to support multiple providers (Gmail, Office 365) plus every flavor of Microsoft Exchange that their customer’s needed. After a brief search, the Dialpad engineering team found the best solution for the job: employing an external API.

Stefan Roesch, an early software engineer at Dialpad (now 450+ employees), needed a secure, reliable API that could scale with their business.

Solution:

Dialpad found the solution to its challenges with the Nylas Universal APIs for email, calendar, and contacts.

“With the Nylas API, I had launchable code for full features in just two days”, says Roesch. “One of the advantages of integrating with Nylas was how straightforward it was to sync contacts across multiple service providers and regardless of which version of Exchange our customers use.”

OAuth enables secure Gmail & Microsoft contacts sync

Nylas’s provider-agnostic API allows for bi-directional sync of all contacts (even across multiple providers, like Gmail, Office 365, and Outlook) without having to reverse-engineer the complicated minutiae of each provider. 

Using a secure OAuth flow (powered by Nylas), Dialpad users can authenticate their contacts’ data for two-way sync between Dialpad and their Gmail and Microsoft accounts.

Full contacts and email CRUD

Nylas powers full CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) capabilities for email, calendar, and contacts data. With full CRUD, Dialpad can offer features beyond two-way data sync between their platform and their user’s Gmail, Office 365, and Microsoft Exchange accounts. Some features they built on top of the Nylas APIs include:

1. Searching for a contact and syncing contacts across the full company for a more complete database:

2. Viewing, editing and creating a contact all within Dialpad:

3. Viewing shared events, like company-wide meetings or holidays:

Results:

Nylas APIs free up engineers’ time for AI projects

With the time saved on building their contacts, email, and calendar integration and the avoidance of ongoing maintenance costs, Dialpad layered in Voice Intelligence and AI features into their platform. With full data sync plus AI, Dialpad engineers were able to focus on their core differentiators and leave the table stakes features to an API.

Now, Dialpad’s end-users can securely authenticate their data to sync with Dialpad, and use the power of AI to be more productive and efficient. These time-saving features have helped Dialpad bring on hundreds of new happy customers and retain them over-time.