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AstroContacts
One directory, every phone, always current — managed contact lists for the field forces and shared devices the mailbox world forgot.
How it’s rated
Full scoreboard ↓Quick answer
AstroContacts is 42Gears' enterprise contact management tool: a centrally-administered company directory pushed to every mobile team member's phone — shared contact lists by team or role, updated once and synced everywhere, so the field workforce always dials the current number. It solves the problem GAL and Google Contacts leave on the table: frontline and field workers on shared or corporate devices who need the right 200 numbers without personal-account sync, spreadsheet exports or WhatsApp-forwarded vCards.
The 42Gears product family
This page covers AstroContacts — the directory tool. The rest of the 42Gears lineup:
Quick facts
30-second orientation- Product
- AstroContacts — enterprise contact management from 42Gears
- Vendor
- 42Gears Mobility Systems (Bengaluru-born, 2009 · founder-run)
- Category
- Enterprise contact management / shared directories
- Model
- Central directory → pushed to mobile teams, updated once, synced everywhere
- Scoping
- Contact lists by team, role or site — drivers see dispatch, not the CFO
- Admin
- Web console + bulk import — the directory as managed data
- Fits
- Field forces, frontline teams, shared devices — where GAL never reaches
- Platform
- Works standalone; natural companion to SureMDM fleets
- Licensing
- Per user / device — light, subscription-based
- In India via
- TechBag — quotes, trials, GST invoicing, Tier-1 support
Understand contact management before you buy it
Most product pages skip this. We start here — so you buy a capability, not a buzzword.
What is enterprise contact management?
Enterprise contact management treats the company phonebook as managed infrastructure: one central directory, scoped lists per team, automatic sync to every phone, and clean joiner/leaver hygiene.
AstroContacts is the frontline-shaped version: built for field forces and shared devices without personal accounts — the workers the mailbox-tied directories never reach.
WhatsApp-forwarded chaos vs a managed directory — the honest table
What consolidation actually replaces, dimension by dimension.
| Dimension | Personal phones + forwarded vCards | Managed directory (AstroContacts) |
|---|---|---|
| Source of truth | Everyone's personal phone, differently wrong | One central directory, admin-owned |
| Number changes | WhatsApp-forwarded vCards for a week | Update once, synced everywhere in minutes |
| Shared devices | No account, no contacts — a blank phonebook | The right directory, no personal account needed |
| New joiner | 'Ask around for numbers' as onboarding | The right lists on the phone, day one |
| Leaver | Customer list departs in their Gmail | Removed from every phone the same hour |
| Finding people | Call two people to reach a third | Search by role/site, dial in two taps |
| Scoping | A 5,000-row export or nothing | Role-based lists — the relevant 200 |
| Cost shape | Invisible: missed handoffs and leaked lists | A light per-user subscription |
Adoption is incremental — one team pilots, the import file grows, and the vCard floods end team by team.
The five pieces of the platform
Vendors love diagrams; buyers need to know what they’re actually operating. Here’s the whole platform, demystified.
Central Directory
Company contacts administered once in a web console — bulk-imported, deduplicated and owned by the org instead of scattered across personal phones.
Distribution Lists
Lists by team, role or site — the driver pool gets dispatch and depots; the sales team gets accounts and support. Nobody carries the whole company.
Sync Engine
Changes propagate to every assigned phone automatically — the new depot number is everywhere before the old one causes a missed delivery.
Mobile App
A clean contacts app on each device — searchable, call/message-ready, and separate from personal contacts.
Admin Console
Joiners, leavers, number changes and list membership handled centrally — contact chaos becomes a two-minute admin task.
One agent on every machine, one console over all of them — modules attach without a second operational world.
Twelve capabilities. Curate, distribute, govern.
AstroContacts replaces the forwarded-vCard economy — and the leaked-list risk — with a pushed, scoped, managed phonebook.
Centralised Directory
One master company phonebook, administered in a web console — the single source of truth personal phones never were.
Bulk Import & Dedupe
The existing spreadsheet-and-vCard chaos imports in one pass — cleaned, deduplicated and structured on the way in.
Team & Role-Based Lists
Drivers get dispatch, engineers get escalation, sales gets accounts — scoped lists mean the right 200 numbers, not a 5,000-row dump.
Automatic Sync Everywhere
Update the depot number once; every assigned phone has it within minutes — no re-shares, no stale vCards, no missed handoffs.
Fast Search & Dial
Field workers search by name, role or site and dial in two taps — the app is a phonebook first, not a CRM cosplay.
Work/Personal Separation
Company contacts live in the app, not merged into personal accounts — offboarding doesn't mean your customer list left in someone's Gmail.
Shared-Device Ready
The depot tablet and the shift phone carry the right directory without any personal account signed in — the use case GAL structurally can't serve.
Lifecycle Updates
New hire appears in the right lists on day one; a leaver vanishes from every phone the same hour — directory hygiene as an admin action.
Rich Contact Fields
Roles, sites, departments and custom fields — enough structure to find 'the electrician at Depot 4' without a phone tree.
Admin Roles & Permissions
Who can edit which lists — HR owns people, dispatch owns depots — with changes audited.
SureMDM Companion
On managed fleets, the app deploys and updates silently via SureMDM — the directory arrives with the device, zero user setup.
Offline Access
The synced directory works without signal — the field engineer in the basement still finds the escalation number.
See the platform behind it
Official 42Gears videos — the managed-fleet world AstroContacts deploys into.
SureMDM — The Enterprise Mobility Solution from 42Gears
The managed-fleet world AstroContacts deploys into.
Take the Pain out of Mobile Device Management
The frontline-device philosophy behind the whole 42Gears family.
SureMDM by 42Gears — Unified Endpoint Management
The console that silently deploys AstroContacts across managed fleets.
Want a live, India-context walkthrough on your own fleet?
Book a guided demo →Every org has a directory. Almost none reaches the frontline.
Here’s what genuinely sets AstroContacts apart from the alternatives.
Built for the workers GAL forgot
Exchange GAL and Google Contacts assume a mailbox per person on a personal-ish device. Field forces on shared and corporate hardware have neither — AstroContacts is directory infrastructure for exactly them.
One update, every phone
The depot number changes once, centrally — and the missed-delivery class of error caused by stale numbers on 400 phones simply ends.
Scoped, not dumped
Role-based lists mean each worker carries their relevant 200 numbers, searchable in two taps — not a 5,000-row export nobody scrolls.
Offboarding stops leaking
Company contacts live in the managed app, not merged into personal Gmail — when someone leaves, the customer list leaves their phone, not your control.
Zero-setup on managed fleets
Via SureMDM the app installs and configures silently — a new driver's phone has the right directory before their first shift, with no account creation ritual.
Light by design
It's a directory tool, not a CRM with onboarding consultants — bulk import to first synced phone is an afternoon, and the subscription is priced like the utility it is.
The numbers behind the platform
What your AstroContacts journey looks like
Directory census
TechBag advisors gather the spreadsheets, vCards and tribal knowledge into one import file — usually the hardest step, done once.
Lists live on a pilot team
Bulk import, role-scoped lists, the app on one team's phones — via SureMDM if the fleet is managed.
Fleet rollout
Remaining teams onboarded, admin roles assigned (HR owns people, dispatch owns depots), lifecycle process wired.
Directory steady state
Changes are two-minute admin tasks that reach every phone; joiners and leavers are clean. TechBag handles renewals.
Trusted across frontline industries in 170+ countries
The review scoreboard
Modelled on Gartner Peer Insights structure. *Counts and breakdowns are illustrative pending verified review collection.
Quick poll — what’s driving your evaluation?
Talk to an advisor“Four hundred drivers, one dispatch number change, zero missed handoffs. Before AstroContacts that change was a week of WhatsApp forwards.”
“Shift phones at every depot carry the full escalation tree with no Google account signed in. This use case simply had no tool before.”
“A departing sales rep no longer walks out with the customer phonebook merged into his personal contacts. Compliance noticed immediately.”
“Site engineers search 'electrician depot 4' and dial. The old method was calling two people to get the number of a third.”
“Deployed silently through SureMDM to the whole fleet overnight. Users woke up with a phonebook; nobody filed a ticket.”
“It's a focused tool — don't expect CRM features, pipelines or e-mail sync. As a managed phonebook it does exactly its one job.”
“Joiners appear in the right lists on day one via bulk sync from HR's sheet. Leavers vanish the same day. Directory hygiene became real.”
“Offline access saved us — basements and remote sites have no signal, but the synced directory is just there.”
Where everyone sits — the grids
Analyst firms bury this view behind paywalls, and G2 retired its Grid. So here’s TechBag’s synthesis of the contact management market — tap any vendor to see why it sits where it does.
TechBag Directory-Tools Grid
Execution strength vs product vision — the classic market map, minus the paywall.
The only purpose-built player for frontline/shared-device directories — a quiet niche with no famous rival. This page's subject.
Frontline Fit × Operational Lightness
The grid nobody publishes — how well each approach reaches field workers vs what it takes to run.
Focused capability at near-zero lift — the utility-tool corner.
Positions are TechBag’s illustrative synthesis of public review-platform data and vendor documentation — not a reproduction of any analyst graphic. Verify before relying on it.
AstroContacts vs the alternatives
Honest column selection: the incumbents are free and bundled — the comparison shows exactly where they stop.
| Dimension | AstroContacts | Exchange GAL | Google Contacts (Workspace) | Shared-contacts add-ons | Spreadsheets & vCards |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Managed push directory | Mailbox-tied directory | Account-tied contacts | Gmail/Outlook plugins | Chaos with columns |
| Shared / frontline devices | The design centre | Structurally can't | Structurally can't | Same limitation | Printouts work anywhere |
| Role/site-scoped lists | Native | Address-list segmentation | Label gymnastics | Group shares | One tab per team |
| Update propagation | Push, minutes | Sync-dependent | Sync-dependent | Plugin-dependent | Re-forward everything |
| Offboarding hygiene | Removed from every phone | Mailbox-scoped | Account-scoped | Leaks | Already leaked |
| MDM deployment | Silent via SureMDM | Via email profiles | Via account setup | Manual-ish | N/A |
| Cost & lift | Light subscription | Bundled | Bundled | Cheap | Free |
| Best fit | Field & frontline fleets | Desk workers in Outlook | Workspace desk teams | Small office teams | Nobody, honestly |
Which directory approach is right for you?
Honest fit signals — because the fastest way to lose your trust is to pretend one product wins every scenario.
Choose AstroContacts if…
- ✓Field or frontline workers need managed directories on mobiles
- ✓Shared devices (depot tablets, shift phones) need contacts without accounts
- ✓Number changes must propagate instantly across hundreds of phones
- ✓Your fleet is on SureMDM — deployment is silent
Choose Exchange GAL if…
- ✓Your users are desk workers living in Outlook
Choose Google Contacts if…
- ✓Workspace-first knowledge-worker teams
Choose an add-on if…
- ✓A small office team just needs shared labels
Stay on spreadsheets if…
- ✓You enjoy missed handoffs (we had to include this column)
What does contact chaos cost you?
Drag the sliders (count mobile workers). Estimates assume ~1 hour per field worker per year lost to number-hunting, stale contacts and missed handoffs, with ~60% removed by a scoped, synced directory — the leaked-list risk isn't priced in. Illustrative and conservative.
Loaded cost = salary + overheads per productive hour. Illustrative only — your TechBag quote models actual device counts and modules.
Three ways to consume it
AstroContacts prices as a light per-user subscription. TechBag folds it into your 42Gears quote with GST invoicing.
Standalone
Best for unmanaged fleets
- App + login deployment
- Central console, scoped lists
- Offline-available directories
With SureMDM
Best for managed fleets
- Silent zero-touch deployment
- Device-group list assignment
- One vendor, one console family
Full 42Gears estate
Best for frontline consolidators
- MDM + kiosk + signage + contacts
- One renewal, one throat to choke
- TechBag models the bundle
Buy it for less — TechBag pricing beats list
Whatever the list prices above, TechBag negotiates a significantly better deal — with GST-compliant INR invoicing and local support. Ask us for your discounted quote.
Get an India-ready quote
Tell us your device counts and current tools — we’ll model it against what you spend today.
The 8 questions to ask every directory vendor
Take this into your next vendor call — including ours.
Demo on an actual shared device with no personal account — the use case that decides this category.
Change a number centrally and time its arrival on a field phone. Minutes, not sync-cycles.
Map your real teams to lists — who needs whom? The 200-number scoped view is the value.
Bring your ugliest spreadsheet to the trial and watch the import/dedupe handle it.
Remove a test user and verify they vanish from every phone — then check what happens to contacts they'd exported.
Airplane-mode a device and search the directory. Field reality is offline reality.
On SureMDM? Push the app silently to a pilot group and confirm zero-touch arrival.
It's a managed phonebook, not a CRM — confirm nobody upstream expects pipelines and email sync.
Questions buyers ask
Ready to evaluate AstroContacts?
Get a quote, scope a one-team pilot with your real import file, or bring your fleet size and let a TechBag advisor price the utility.
Stats, ratings, review counts and pricing are illustrative and sourced from public materials; verify before purchase.