domainwidedelegation.comStart free

Use cases → Admin and governance

Synchronise company contact lists across Workspace

Keep all users’ Workspace contacts aligned with a central directory by pushing updates via a delegated service account.

Who it is forIT teams managing a shared address book or maintaining up-to-date contacts for the entire organisation.
APIsAdmin SDK
Typical scopesadmin.directory.user, admin.directory.user.readonly

The problem

Users’ contacts drift from the official directory, leading to missed emails, duplicate entries, and inconsistent information. Manual updates don't scale and quickly fall behind changes in staff or details.

How it works

  1. Maintain a canonical source of contact truth outside Workspace.
  2. Use the Admin SDK to enumerate users and update their contact lists by impersonating each account.
  3. Apply changes incrementally to avoid over-writing user-added details.
  4. Log each update with the user and contact IDs for traceability.

What changes

Contact lists reflect the current state of the official directory, reducing confusion and manual effort for end users.

The trap in this one. The Contacts API enforces per-user write quotas that are not documented in the Admin SDK, so bulk updates can silently drop or throttle changes without warning. A naïve sync script that processes all users in sequence will hit quota limits mid-run, causing partial and inconsistent propagation—often without any error if requests are rate-limited but eventually accepted. Stagger your updates and monitor for 429 or 503 responses to ensure all intended changes land.

Questions people ask

Can we push contacts to everyone at once?

Not reliably. Bulk pushes rapidly hit undocumented per-user and per-customer quotas; stagger updates and build in retry logic with exponential backoff.

Does the sync overwrite user-added details?

Unless you merge carefully, yes. Always fetch and reconcile existing contacts to avoid erasing information users have added themselves.

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

Related use cases

Audit which third-party apps can read your mail

List every OAuth grant across the domain and find the retired tools still holding access.

Automate joiners, movers and leavers

Create accounts, set group membership, provision Drive and hand over mailboxes without a manual checklist.

Continuously verify your delegation still works

A scheduled probe that proves every API still answers under every tenant, before a customer finds out otherwise.