Disable Contact Sharing for Organizational Unit

[Gretchen Nobles]

I would like to have Contact Sharing enabled for all my staff members, but for my students I want it disabled.  I don't want the student email accounts being listed when staff members start to type a name.  Is there any way I could use GAM to turn off Contact Sharing for everyone in the student group?

[Jay Lee]

Hi Gretchen,

  Contact sharing is currently a global option, it can be enabled or disabled for your entire Google Apps organization. It cannot be toggled at the Organizational Unit or subdomain level. You can clear the "Automatically share NNN's contact information when contact sharing is enabled." setting in the Web Dashboard however there's currently no way to change that setting via Google's APIs thus there's no way for GAM to clear it. Further, clearing this setting would prevent the given user from showing up in shared contacts during searches but it would not prevent the user from searching shared contacts (e.g. students could still look up staff members).

Jay

[Oliver Hartley]

as far as i know there is no API to control that Setting there for it's no posible. :-(

Oliver Hartley Lyon | CTO | Tel: +562-640-3900 | Cel: +569-9162-7029

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 3:34 PM, Gretchen Nobles <gno...@gmail.com> wrote:

I would like to have Contact Sharing enabled for all my staff members, but for my students I want it disabled.  I don't want the student email accounts being listed when staff members start to type a name.  Is there any way I could use GAM to turn off Contact Sharing for everyone in the student group?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "Google Apps Manager" group.
To post to this group, send email to
google-ap...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
google-apps-man...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/google-apps-manager

[Gretchen]

Okay. Thanks for the quick answer even if it wasn't the answer I
wanted!!!

I really don't care about the students looking up staff members as
most of them are teachers and it's okay for students to email
teachers. I mainly didn't want all the student names to auto-populate
when staff and faculty start to type addresses because that could get
annoying.

Just to make sure I'm understanding you correctly:

You are saying that I could uncheck the "Automatically share
"joe_student's" contact information and that will prevent Joe Student
from showing up in the auto populated list when staff members start
typing in the "To" field?

But there is no batch processing way to uncheck that option for a
group of users... it has to manually be done for each individual
user?

And it's also not something I can designate as on or off when I create
a batch of users?

It seems like if they are going to offer Organizational Units - they
would give us the ability to keep those units independent of each
other!!!

Thanks!
~G

[Gerard Duerrmeyer]

In my opinion, the whole concept of contact sharing as it currently is
implemented in Google Apps, is BROKEN.
There are solutions, such as http://www.floreysoft.net/, but as for
builtin functionality I am rather embarrassed with the state of
things.
I have hopes that someday Google will implement shared address books
and proper contact sharing like exist in all other enterprise mail
solutions. Zimbra did this rather brilliantly over 5 years ago, not to
mention the other competing products which I prefer not to name.
So Gretchen, I feel your pain, this has been a significant thorn in
our side since migrating to Google Apps. You might consider looking at
FloreySoft to see if it provides a solution for your needs. I have not
really tested UCM yet but the Shared Address Book works reasonably
well. We have sporadic issues with contacts getting duplicated many
times over but it is certainly better than nothing.

Good luck!

GD

[Gretchen Nobles]

Just wanted to post an update that I submitted a trouble ticket/request about this issue.  Apparently they're "working on it" but can't give an estimated time of availability.  Maybe the more people that request it the better!!!

What I sent:

Could you extend the Provisioning API to allow removal of users from Shared Contacts?  I would like one set of users to have shared contacts and another set (students) to not have it.  It would be great if we could turn this feature on and off at the organizational level.

Or if there is a different way to remove a batch of users please let me know!  Thanks!

Their Reply:

Your request is already part of a feature request that is currently in development. Unfortunately, I don't have an estimated release date and can not tell you when this feature will be available.  I will keep you posted as soon as I have more information!

[Jay Lee]

Gretchen,

  Thanks for doing that. Yes, I strongly recommend anyone that wants to see this submit a ticket. Google like any company sets priorities based on customer need so if you tell them you need this feature, they're more likely to emphasis it and get it to us sooner.

  Make sure you emphasis the need for a way of doing this via the API. Google Apps has always been a bit strange in that some things can only be done via the web interface (user shared contacts setting, user email routing, management of phone sync, etc) and other things can only be done via the API (user renames, email settings changes for users, bulk updates, etc).

Jay
--

Jay Lee | Senior Network / System Administrator

Philadelphia Biblical University

200 Manor Ave | Langhorne, PA 19047-2990

http://www.pbu.edu

--

[Lukáš Mižoch]

After more than two years Google still didn't implement this feature. What a shame. :(

[Michel Fasen]

You can change the user's visibility in the Global Address List by changing the profile: https://code.google.com/p/google-apps-manager/wiki/ExamplesEmailSettings#Changing_a_users_profile_to_hidden/unhidden

[Lukáš Mižoch]

That's perfect, thank you very much. :)

Dne středa, 26. června 2013 10:27:22 UTC+2 Michel Fasen napsal(a):

[James Irving]

Coming to this much later...If GAM didn't have control over this, it does now.

The command "gam user user...@domain.com show profile" shows the status of the contact sharing setting on the individual account, and "gam user user...@domain.com profile shared | unshared" will toggle the flag.

For primitive batching (there's probably a better way!) I would bring a list of the usernames into GSheet or Excel, use text formulas to generate a series of commands affecting the individual accounts, and copy/paste the whole set of commands into a Windows command window to execute in one step.