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Use cases → Admin and governance

Synchronise a central contact directory to user address books

Push a master contact list into all users’ Google Contacts using domain-wide delegation, keeping everyone’s address book consistent and up to date.

Who it is forWorkspace admins maintaining an authoritative contact list for all staff.
APIsAdmin SDK
Typical scopesadmin.directory.user, admin.directory.user.readonly

The problem

Manual contact management leads to out-of-date or inconsistent address books, especially in larger or distributed organisations. Centralising the source and pushing to users keeps everyone aligned, but must be automated to avoid drift.

How it works

  1. Maintain a master list of contacts in a controlled source (e.g., an internal database or Google Sheet).
  2. Enumerate all active users with Admin SDK and impersonate each via the service account.
  3. For each user, reconcile their Contacts with the master list, adding, updating, or deleting as needed using the People API.
  4. Log every mutation and surface exceptions for manual review.

What changes

User address books reflect the current central directory, reducing lookup errors and internal misrouting.

The trap in this one. The People API’s batchCreateContacts and batchUpdateContacts endpoints silently drop or reorder requests if the payload exceeds quota or contains duplicate contact data. This results in partial syncs where some users’ address books are missing updates with no error at the API layer. Always chunk requests to well below the documented limits and verify post-sync state by spot-checking real user accounts.

Questions people ask

Can this overwrite users’ personal contacts?

No, provided you use a dedicated label or group for managed contacts. Avoid touching contacts outside that namespace.

How fast do changes propagate?

API changes are generally visible in the UI within a minute, but sync issues can arise if users are actively editing contacts during the update.

Want this built?

This is a pattern we run in production. We will set up the delegation and build this on top of it — $500 per hour, most of it working the same day.

Talk to us Or read the setup guide

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