Google Apps Go Social With Improved Contacts & A New API
With some core changes to contacts, Google Apps has dipped a toe in to the enterprise social networking waters. As of today, Apps contacts exhibits shades of Facebook and Twitter by allowing you to find and interact with all the user profiles in your Apps suite.
According to Google, these adjustments where made at the behest of enterprise Apps users. It has also made a user profiles API available to Premier Edition customers, one that allows IT to retrieve and manipulate data about all the people using Apps in a company.
How the New Contacts Work
Previously, contacts within Google Apps functioned just like email: only people you'd previously communicated 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.
For those who've ponied up for the Premier Edition of Google Apps, a new API will let you call up data pertaining to all the user profiles in your company Apps suite. That's on top of the shared contacts API released in December of 2008.
More Facebook Than Gmail
By letting users search and interact with user profiles regardless of whether they are "contacts" or not, Google Apps has become slightly more like a corporate social network. While it still deigns to use terminology like "address book" instead of a friend and/or subscriber list, it's no longer tied to behaving like email.Not to say that this is revolutionary for Apps. On the contrary, enterprise users of the suite would naturally demand full access to profiles, since there's no logical reason why you shouldn't have at least theoretical access to the contact information of everyone in your company using the platform.
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This wasn't the only update by the way; Google Mail now also allows you to drag & drop messages to labels and the labels view got a small update as well (hiding more labels by default).
But it seems that Google will never understand that it's contradictory. They can connect profiles with other network services, but if you don't have the space you need, than you can be beaten by whatever group that offers that.
I've got a profile full of files and had to open the second. In two months, It's 5% used. So, in 3 years, I'll be opening the next profile. Each profile has to have new contacts and a new identity. So this integration should work for heavy users, but it won't, because heavy users must have to have more space in their e-mails (and for sure, they are no going to pay for that).
This looks like it provides an enterprise wide address book. Not sure what makes this a social networking, unless you call outlook social networking software too.
All I really want is for them to add things like Google Reader to Google Apps. Buy buying Google Apps I've had to use fewer applications, which is kinda weird. (Sure, I "could" use reader, but under a different email address, which makes sharing etc. impossible).
I don't yet see any difference in Contacts, so perhaps this only affects Premium users. I *did* notice that up to a few months ago, creation of a new user would automatically populate the new user's address book with all other contacts on our Google Apps domain, which seems logical. Then that behaviour changed and it was necessary to create a list for import. In my opinion all users of the same Google Apps domain should automatically appear in the contacts list of each user. Perhaps, in the case of very large domains, this behaviour could be switched off.
The new drag and drop labels feature for email is a nice surprise, anyhow.
Great article. Hopefully we will see more features like this soon. Very helpful
Keep the good info coming.
Chris Moniz
VP Marketing, Internet Marketing Professor
http://www.drdavehaleonline.com
Thank you for your sharing.!