Data export in the vCard format

Note

The following information is relevant only for ELMA 3.13.9 or higher.

In ELMA you can export data from User, Contractor, Lead and Contact pages in the vCard format (.vcf).

vCard is a text format for exchanging contact information (electronic business cards) in different applications with email clients (e.g. MS Outlook). Each file contains the information of one business card.

Different system objects can be downloaded as files with different sets of data.

user page: full name, position, organization, birthday, e-mail, phone numbers (mobile, office), Skype, ICQ, Jabber ID;
contractor page: name (for legal entity), full name (for individual), organization (for legal entity), phone numbers, fax, e-mail, website, legal address (postal code, city, street, house);
lead page: names, phone numbers, e-mail, website, description, address (postal code, city, street, house);
contact page: full name, position, organization, e-mail, website, phone numbers, address (postal code, city, street, house), description.

Prerequisites of Export in the vCard format

In order to export data from the pages of the objects listed above, enable the vCard component in Administration – License Information – Components on the Available tab (fig. 1).

Fig. 1. vCard plug-in

Apart from that, the exported fields on object pages must be filled in (e.g. phone numbers, e-mail, address, date of birth, etc.). If the fields are empty, a blank business card will be exported.

Note

In order to display the exported data correctly in MS Outlook, you may need to change the encoding of the outgoing vCard from Cyrillic (Windows) to Unicode (UTF-8). Learn more about this in the Outlook Help Center.

Business cards can be exported from different sections of the system:

from a user page by clicking the Export vCard button under the user’s photograph (fig. 2);

Fig. 2. “Export vCard” button on a user page

from a user profile by clicking the Export vCard button under the user’s photograph (fig. 3);

Fig. 3 “Export vCard” button in user profile

from a Contractor, Lead and/or Contact page by clicking on the Actions – Export vCard button (fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Drop-down menu of the “Actions” button on the contractor page

When you click Export vCard, the data export will start. Depending on the browser you are using, a dialog box (fig. 5) might open where you will need to choose the action to perform with the file (open or save it on your computer) and click OK.

In fig. 5 you can see a window that opens in Mozilla Firefox version 63.0.3.

Fig. 5. “Open or save the file” window

Note that by default the files with exported objects have the following names:

file with user data – User.vcf;
file with contractor data – Contractor.vcf (fig. 5);
file with lead data – Lead.vcf;
file with contact data – Contact.vcf.

As a rule, vCard files open in the default e-mail client. In fig. 6 you can see an example of a business card opened in MS Outlook.

Fig. 6. A contact business card exported from ELMA and opened in MS Outlook

In fig. 6 you can see that the export has been successful – the information from the user profile/object page in ELMA (in this example, name, company, job title and e-mail) is displayed in the respective fields in MS Outlook.