New features in Admin SDK: Custom user attributes, and opening up access to all domain users

[ed: This post originally appeared on the Google Developers Blog]

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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Deprecated Google Apps Admin APIs to be discontinued in April 2015

In May 2013 we introduced the Admin SDK, which enables developers to build customized administrative tools for organizations that use Google Apps. Later in July 2013, we followed with the release of the new improved Email Migration API v2. 

With each of these introductions, we also announced the deprecation of a set of corresponding APIs, such as the Provisioning API and Email Migration API v1, that would be replaced by the new APIs (see full list below).

As of April 20, 2015, we will discontinue these deprecated APIs. This means that service calls to these APIs are no longer supported, and Google Apps features implemented using these APIs will not function. 

Developers can find comparable functionality in the Admin SDK and the Email Migration API v2.

	Discontinued API	Replacement API
	Admin Audit	Admin SDK Reports API
	Google Apps Profiles	Admin SDK Directory API
	Provisioning	Admin SDK Directory API
	Reporting	Admin SDK Reports API
	Email Migration API v1	Email Migration API v2
	Reporting Visualization	No replacement available*

In the coming weeks, we’ll be contacting domain administrators whose applications currently use these deprecated APIs with an email reminder and guidance on the appropriate migration path.

* Edited on Oct 9, 2014: The Admin SDK Reports API is not the replacement for the deprecated Reporting Visualization API, as originally communicated. There is no replacement API available in the Admin SDK for the deprecated Reporting Visualization API.


Note: all launches are applicable to all Google Apps editions unless otherwise noted

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Calendar GData API / Google Calendar Connectors deprecation

Back in November 2011, we announced the deprecation of the Calendar GData API (v1, v2) when the APIv3 was made available. We’ll now be shutting down these older versions on November 17, 2014.

Any service dependent on the Calendar GData API (v1, v2), such as the Google Calendar Connectors (GCC), will no longer work as intended. GCC users should update to use Calendar Interop or their own custom built connectors that sync with v3 of the API.

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