Domain Shared Contacts API overview

The Domain Shared Contacts API lets your applications get and update external contacts that are shared with all users in a Google Workspace domain. Shared contacts are visible to all users of a Google Workspace domain and all Google services have access to the contact list.

Your application can use the Domain Shared Contacts API to create shared contacts, edit or delete existing shared contacts, and query for shared contacts that match a particular criteria.

The Domain Shared Contacts API is only available to Google Workspace accounts. To use the API, enable the Domain Shared Contacts API in the Admin console. Shared contact changes can take up to 24 hours to be reflected in the email address autocomplete and the contact manager.

In addition to providing background on the capabilities of the Domain Shared Contacts API, this document offers examples about how to manage contacts by using XML and HTTP. After reading this document, you can learn more about interacting with the API by using our client libraries.

Audience

This document is intended for developers who want to write client applications that can manipulate Google's contact lists by using HTTP and XML. This document assumes that you understand the fundamentals behind the Google Data APIs protocol.

If you're using a UNIX operating system and you want to try the examples in this document without writing any code, use the UNIX command-line utilities curl or wget. Learn how to use cURL with Google Data services.

Principles

This version of the Domain Shared Contacts API follows the principles of the Google Data APIs. Google Data APIs are based on both the Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0 syndication formats in addition to the Atom Publishing Protocol.

Specify a version

Every request that you send using the Domain Shared Contacts API should specify version 3.0 of the API:

GData-Version: 3.0

If you can't set HTTP headers, you can specifyv=3.0 as a query parameter in the URL, but the HTTP header method is recommended.