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Google Retools Contacts In Google Apps With New APIs

If you're an enterprise user of Google Apps, here's some good news for you. The biggest new feature is a user profile API that gives enterprise admins way more power to manage all the users within their own domain.

According to Google, the new features are ones that enterprise customers have been clamoring for, and they are reserved only for Google Apps Premier Edition customers. In other words, normal Gmail users, avert your eyes, lest ye become filled with envy at the new found power that enterprise customers now have.

The new user profile API will be a big help for admins, especially when combined with the existing shared contacts API. With the user profile API, "administrators can retrieve and update profile information for all users on a company domain, giving companies the option to provide rich user information to make it easier for employees to find and contact each other," says Florian Niemann, Engineer, Google Apps team.

In other words, global address books just became infinitely more manageable and useful for Google Apps users.

This means that when end users search through their contacts, not only will they see the contacts they've added manually and via replying to emails, but they will also automatically have access to the global address book to find the contact information of their co-workers.

Last, Google also updated the contacts user interface a little bit. As admins add new contact info to the global address list, it will automatically be pushed down to all users.

These changes are good news, especially for large organizations that have multiple locations.

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