By Muzammil Esmail,
Product Manager, Google for Work
The Admin SDK provides a comprehensive directory
experience for Google for Work customers to help them meet specific business needs around data
storage for customers. Here are some important updates to this SDK.
Custom attributes in the user’s
profile
Now available is a new feature in the
Directory API which allows you to add custom attributes for your users. For instance, you
could store the projects your users work on, their desk number, job level, hiring date —
whatever makes sense for your business.
Once the custom attributes for your
domain have been defined, they behave just like regular fields in the user profile. You can
get and set them for your users and also perform searches on custom fields (e.g. “all employees that work on the
shinyNewApp in Hyderabad”).
Custom attributes can be of different
data types; they can be single- or multi-valued. You can configure whether they are “public”
i.e. visible to everyone on the domain, or “private” i.e. visible only to admins and the users
themselves.
Read access to all domain
users
Historically, only admins have been able
to access the data in the Admin SDK. Beginning today, any user (not just admins) will now be
able to call the Directory API to read the profile of any user on the domain (of course, we will
respect ACLing settings and profile sharing settings).
We hope that you will be able to use this
new feature to build business applications (e.g. corporate yellow pages, expense approval,
vacation management, workflow applications, etc.) that can be used by all your users.
Please feel free to go through our documentation to go learn more
about the Admin SDK, and specifically the
Directory API. Happy
hacking!
