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!

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Posted by Mugur Marculescu, Product Manager

The gRPC team is excited to announce the immediate availability of gRPC Beta. This release marks an important point in API stability and going forward most API changes are expected to be additive in nature. This milestone opens the door for gRPC use in production environments.

We’re also taking a big step forward in improving the installation process. Over the past few weeks, we’ve rolled out gRPC packages to Debian Stable/Backports. Installation in most cases is now a two line install using the Debian package and available language specific package managers (e.g. maven, pip, gem, composer, pecl, npm, nuget, pod). In addition gRPC docker images are now available on Docker Hub.

We’ve updated the documentation on grpc.io to reflect the latest changes and released additional language-specific reference docs. See what’s changed with the Beta release in the release notes on Github for Java, Go and all other languages.

In the coming months, the focus of the gRPC project will be to keep improving performance and stability and adding carefully chosen features for production use cases. This is part of our principles and goals to enable highly performant and scalable APIs and microservices on top of HTTP/2. Documentation will also be clarified and will continue to improve with new examples and guides.

We’ve been very excited to see the community response to gRPC and the various projects starting to use it (etcd v3 experimental api, grpc-gateway for RESTful APIs and others). We really want to thank everyone who contributed code, gave presentations, adopted the technology and engaged in the community. With your help support we look forward to the 1.0!

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