One of Gmail's weaknesses is that it has not supported all of the fields that a particular contact may have...until today, that is. Google fixed that. Google also recently explained why some Outlook plug-ins won't work with Google Apps.I always wondered why Gmail didn't recognize all the fields in a given contact. You'd import your contacts from another application, and often Gmail lumped a bunch of the fields under the "notes" section. I didn't think that was very useful, and neither did a whole bunch of people.

According to Benjamin Grol, Product Manager for Gmail, "We added support for more contact fields (like birthday and website) and now store each of these fields separately, which makes syncing and round-tripping your data work better. We updated the standalone contact manager with this improvement last month and now it's available in Gmail too, with support for Outlook, Outlook Express, Hotmail and Yahoo in CSV format, and OS X Address Book in vCard format." Good stuff.

In other Google-related email news, the company took some time to explain some of the issues users are seeing with respect to Outlook-Google Apps sync.

Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook was meant to make it easier for Outlook users to switch to Google Apps. Google knows that Outlook users use a host of plug-ins to improve the functionality of Outlook. Google did the best it could, but was unable to build support for all the plug-ins in this initial release of Google Apps Sync for Outlook.

Three, in particular, aren't supported. They include Microsoft Office Outlook Connector, Acrobat PDF Maker Toolbar, and Outlook Change Notifier. Google recommends that if you want to continue using these plug-ins, uninstall Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, and the uninstaller will re-enable the plug-ins.

Google also points out that Windows Desktop Search and PGP.com's encryption plugin won't work properly.

Google suggests users experiencing any problems hit up its help center, where more detail and some answers are available.