Ford Sync, Windows Phone and Phone Book Syncing

Are you having trouble syncing your contacts from Windows Phone to your Ford Sync phone book?

There is a situation on both Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 where Ford Sync will only sync a small portion of a phone’s contacts to the phone book and will refuse to sync the rest, no matter how many times you erase the phone book and tell it to sync again.

The issue, I believe, is that contacts from Twitter in Windows Phone seem to cause the sync process to fail. Fortunately, there is a workaround.

On your phone, go to Settings. Swipe over to the applications pivot and go to the people settings. Click the filter my contact list button.

On the filter screen, I unchecked Twitter and LinkedIn … I think that Twitter accounts are actually the problem, but I didn’t care about syncing my LinkedIn accounts to my Ford Sync, so I unchecked that one too. 🙂

Now, if your phone book on Ford Sync isn’t empty, erase it.  This option is found in the settings in Ford Sync. On that same screen there is a button for downloading the phone book.  It will take a little while, but you should get your contacts now.

If you like, you can go back and re-check Twitter so that those contacts show up in your People hub now. Note, though, that new contacts may not sync to your Ford Sync phone book if you do.

If anyone has any more information on why this problem occurs, please let me know and I’ll update the post. But hopefully this will help someone work around the issue.