Manage Emergency contacts remotely

Question

I'm looking to manage multiple Android devices and put ICE Contacts on all of them. Unfortunately EMM/MDM solutions are prohibitively expensive, and all I've looked at don't actually do any contact management (that i can see).

I realize we could just setup a bunch of gmail accounts, and set the contacts that way, but most of the phones have Google contact sync turned off, and there would be quite a few accounts to login to.

We are using ActiveSync with them, but i've not been able to get ActiveSync to actually push Emergency contacts the right way. That may be the easiest solution if we can do that.

Are there any good inexpensive/free solutions to push out emergency contacts?

Alternatively is there a way to manage from a central location, sync settings for gmail accounts? So we wouldn't have to touch each phone directly.

Answer 1

So i figured this out, and it was deceptively simple. It seems to be an 'undocumented' feature that if you set up a category within outlook with the name of ICE, it will automatically (at least on samsung phones) set contacts tagged with that category into the ICE group on the phone.

I ended up writing a script that ensures whoever has outlook gets the category, and then contacts tagged with that category.