domainwidedelegation.comStart free

Use cases → Admin and governance

Keep the domain contact directory up to date centrally

Push updates to directory contacts across the organisation using a delegated service account, ensuring everyone has the right details.

Who it is forIT administrators maintaining organisation-wide contact details for staff, shared mailboxes and external partners.
APIsAdmin SDK
Typical scopesadmin.directory.user, admin.directory.user.readonly

The problem

Contact information in the directory drifts over time, leading to bounced mail, missed calls and confusion. Manual updates are error-prone, slow and quickly out of date.

How it works

  1. Authorise a delegated service account with directory admin scopes.
  2. Synchronise the source of truth (HR, CRM or other system) with the Google Directory via the Admin SDK.
  3. For each contact, update or create directory entries with current details.
  4. Remove or flag obsolete contacts as appropriate.

What changes

Everyone in the organisation sees accurate, current contact details in autocomplete, Contacts and Gmail.

The trap in this one. The Admin SDK's user update endpoint accepts partial updates, but fields omitted from the payload are left unchanged rather than cleared. If your sync logic ever drops a field (for example, if a phone number is removed in the source), the old value persists in the directory. To avoid silent data rot, explicitly clear fields that are blank in the source, or you will accumulate stale data.

Questions people ask

Does this update personal contacts?

No, it only affects the global directory, not users' private contacts.

How quickly do changes propagate?

Directory updates are visible in autocomplete and Contacts usually within minutes, but some clients may cache data for longer.

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.