San Francisco — While making some essential modifications to contacts, Google Apps has dipped its toe into the enterprise social networking waters. Google has issued a few enhancements late last week to various Apps services, including global address list functionality to its enterprise application suite, which enables users within an organization to share templates with each other.
Google already has a styles gallery for Google Docs where people can share templates such as presentation designs and spreadsheets. But now, the biggest change to the Premier Edition of Google Apps is that users can now share and interact with other Apps Profiles, a feature that Google says was requested by its enterprise customers.
According to Google, these updates where made at the behest of enterprise Apps users. The latest updates also include a user profile API (application programming interface) that empowers administrators retrieve and update profile information for all users on the company domain. The tool is designed to assist administrators maintain an elaborate global address list in Google Apps. The API is only available to Google Apps Premier Edition users.
“For beginners, we have launched a new API that, when combined with the existing shared contacts API, gives administrators the ability to maintain an updated and detailed global address list in Google Apps,” Florian Niemann, a Google Engineer in the Apps team, wrote on the Google Enterprise Blog. “We have also updated the Contacts interface throughout the Google Apps suite — particularly in Gmail — making it less complicated for employees to find and start collaborating with all other users on their company domain.”
Software engineer Valerie Blechar wrote on the Google Enterprise blog that the user-profiles API would, when combined with the shared-contacts API that Google published in December last year, give IT administrators “the ability to maintain an updated and detailed global address list in Google Apps”.
Previously, contacts interface within Google Apps functioned just like email: only people you have earlier established communication with or added intentionally appeared. But now, a search will provide profiles from your company’s entire address book, acting very similar to the way enterprise social networking platforms treat user profiles.
Once a templates gallery has been shared within an organization, colleagues can preview, use and rate that template.
Google has been regularly updating Google Apps in recent months, in an effort to convert customers of companies such as Microsoft to its hosted applications. Other updates include Gmail for business users that offers new ways to organize labels, which users place on messages to tag them.