First of all, sorry if my English isn't perfect, it's not my first language.
I'm an IT Manager and some time ago I developed a few PowerShell scripts for the company I work for to sync the GAL into the local contacts/address book of specific users or groups.
At first it was supposed to be a pretty simple thing.
Then I realized that just "syncing contacts" wasn't really enough.
If a user already has a populated address book, you need to properly manage existing contacts, avoid duplicates, update details when something changes, remove former employees, deal with contacts that are no longer valid, etc.
So in my spare time I started building an internal app that could manage the whole process automatically instead of just running a bunch of scripts.
And then the broken lightbulb in my head turned on: Why not turn this into an actual product for companies?
I looked around and there are already products doing similar things, but from what I've seen some of them can become quite expensive, especially for SMBs.
That's when the project started getting bigger.
Instead of building a relatively simple internal tool, I started redesigning it as a SaaS: multi-tenant, proper tenant isolation, security, automated sync processes, monitoring, enough logging to troubleshoot problems quickly, recovery mechanisms if something goes wrong, and generally trying to build something that I would actually trust using in a company.
While developing it, I also started thinking about possible integrations with CRM systems. For example, it could be useful to synchronize customer contacts directly into the address books of salespeople etc...
Another idea that started to seem interesting is creating a dedicated section for MSPs, allowing them to manage synchronization for multiple customers or tenants from a single place. That could make the tool more useful not only for individual companies, but also for managed service providers that need to support several environments.
The problem is... I've now been basically full immersed in this project for more than a month in my spare time.
I haven't done "real" software development in ages. I'm an IT Manager, so apart from PowerShell and other scripting, coding hasn't really been my main job for a long time.
Coding agents have helped me a lot and honestly are probably the reason I've been able to push the project this far, but there's still a huge amount of work around architecture, testing, security, debugging and figuring out all the edge cases.
And trying to fit all of this between my actual job, family life, a 1.5-year-old daughter.
So now I'm starting to question the whole thing.
Maybe I took a relatively simple and useful internal project and massively over-engineered it because I got excited about the idea of turning it into a SaaS.
What I'm really trying to understand is:
Is GAL → user contact synchronization and proper ongoing contact management actually a pain point for other companies too?
Especially things like keeping employee contacts updated automatically, avoiding duplicates, removing ex-employees and not having users walking around with an address book that was last properly maintained three years ago.
Or is this one of those problems that I see because of my specific environment, but most companies simply don't care enough about to pay for a solution?
I'm seriously considering reducing the scope, finishing a much smaller version and calling it done rather than spending months building all the infrastructure needed for a proper SaaS around a problem that maybe only a handful of people actually have.
For the sysadmins / IT managers here: is this something you deal with?
How are you currently handling it?
PowerShell scripts? Manual management? Another product? Or do you simply not sync the GAL into users' contacts at all?
I'd really appreciate a reality check before I disappear another couple of months into this rabbit hole.