Shared contacts
Promote a private contact to an org-wide surface so your whole team can view, comment, and send — all with granular per-member permits.
Your personal contact graph belongs to you alone. Shared contacts are a lightweight org-level overlay that lets you invite teammates to collaborate on a specific contact. Your private notes, labels, and identity data never reach anyone else.
How sharing works
When you own a contact, you can promote it to a shared contact. This creates an org-level entry with:
- A member list where you control each person's permit level.
- A threaded comment space your team can use for internal discussion, separate from the actual inbox.
- The ability for permitted members to send outbound messages through that contact's channels.
The contact's private details — labels, your notes, and the rest of your contact graph — remain yours. Teammates see the shared surface, not your private graph.
One shared contact per person
A contact can have at most one shared-contact entry per org. If the owner deletes a shared contact, the contact in their private graph is unaffected.
Share a contact
Open the contact
In the Contacts view, find the contact you want to share and open their detail sheet.
Click Share
Select Share contact from the context menu or the detail sheet header. This promotes the contact to a shared contact and opens the member management sheet.
Add members and set permits
Search for teammates by name or email. For each member you add, choose a permit level: View, Comment, or Send (see the permit table below).
Save
Confirm. CommSync notifies the members you added, and the contact appears in their shared contacts list immediately.
Permit levels
Three levels control what a member can do with the shared contact, ordered from least to most access:
| Permit | What it allows |
|---|---|
VIEW | See the contact in the shared list; read comment threads. |
COMMENT | Everything in View, plus post and reply in comment threads, add reactions, pin messages, and @mention teammates. |
SEND | Everything in Comment, plus send outbound messages through the contact's channels. |
Who gets access automatically
You do not need to add explicit members for yourself, your org owner, or your org admins. They receive Send access on every shared contact in the org:
| Who | Effective permit |
|---|---|
| Org owner | ✓ Send |
| Org admin | ✓ Send |
| Contact owner (you) | ✓ Send |
| Explicitly added member | The permit you chose (View, Comment, or Send) |
| Everyone else | — No access |
When SEND degrades to COMMENT
A member with a SEND permit can only send if they own at least one channel
that can reach this contact. That means a phone number for an SMS contact, or
an email account for an email contact. If they have the permit but no usable
channel, their effective access is COMMENT until they gain a usable
channel. The composer shows the appropriate message in each case.
Members can use any compatible channel they own — even one that never took part in the conversation.
Manage members
Only the contact owner, org owner, and org admins can add, change, or remove members. Open the shared contact's member list to:
- Add a new member and set their permit.
- Upgrade or downgrade a member's current permit.
- Remove a member entirely.
When you add a new member, they gain visibility into future messages on that contact's threads. CommSync does not retroactively show historical messages — their view starts at the time of the grant.
Some conversations can opt out
A conversation marked Keep out of team and contact shares never reaches members through a shared contact, even when the contact covers it. It disappears for members who see it only through the share, and it stays visible for people with access to its line. See Sharing a conversation.
To transfer ownership of a shared contact to another member, use Transfer ownership in the settings sheet. This demotes you to the explicit permit you held before (or View if none).
Comment threads
The comment space on a shared contact is for internal team discussion — it is completely separate from the inbox thread where actual customer messages live.
Comments on shared contacts are part of the org-wide team comments system. A discussion about one of the contact's conversations also appears on that conversation's own comments panel, so teammates who reach the conversation another way — their own line, a named share, or a team — join the same discussion.
Within a comment thread you can:
- Open a new discussion thread or reply to one that already exists.
- Resolve or unresolve threads to track what still needs attention.
- React to messages with emoji.
- Pin important messages for quick reference.
- @mention a teammate to send them an email notification.
- Edit or delete your own messages.
Comments vs messages
Use comment threads for internal notes ("follow up Monday", "check on the contract"). Use Send through the contact's channels for messages that actually go out to the customer. They are separate flows and do not cross-post.
Real-time updates
When a shared contact you can see is updated — member changes, new comments, reactions — your view refreshes automatically. If the owner archives or deletes the contact, it disappears from your list without a page reload.
Remove a shared contact
Only the contact owner can archive a shared contact. When the owner archives it, that removes it from all members' shared lists and disables the comment space. This does not affect the contact in the owner's private contact graph.