New features in Admin SDK: Custom user attributes, and opening up access to all domain users
September 23rd, 2014 | Published in Google Apps
[ed: This post originally appeared on the Google Developers Blog]
By Muzammil Esmail, Product Manager, Google for Work
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!
Note: all launches are applicable to all Google Apps editions unless otherwise noted
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