Posted by Amanda Camp, Software Engineer, Google Contacts

Today we’re adding a couple of new ways to share your contacts: Contacts Delegation and an enhanced shared Directory. Both of these features were inspired by feedback from customers who wanted more ways to manage shared contacts.

Contacts Delegation
Google Apps users can now delegate their contacts to other people at their organization. Many of you might already have someone help manage your inbox or schedule with our email and calendar delegation features. Now, you can delegate management of your contacts without granting access to your entire email inbox. While this feature is great for support staff, it can also be used by anyone who wants to share their contacts with a colleague at their organization.

Shared Directory
We’ve also improved the Directory shared across your organization to make it a more functional collection of shared contacts for everyone in your domain. Now, the Directory can display all of the domain's users, all of the domain's shared contacts, or both. As before, individual users may also be selectively hidden from the Directory.

We’re always adding new enhancements to Apps. On the Contacts front, we plan to continue improving access to fresh, relevant and appropriate contact information to keep you more connected.

Update: We're excited to announce that the new Gmail Contacts for Google Apps has launched for all Rapid Release users as of 4/7/11. Please continue to give us your feedback in the Comments below.

In our ever-connected world, working revolves around collaborating. It’s important to be able to quickly reach people in your network, speeding up the tasks you perform daily, like making a phone call or sending an email – whether you’re at your desk or on the go. To help with this, we’re rolling out an updated version of Contacts that makes it easier to use, organize and edit your work contacts in Gmail.

In addition to all of the improvements we made to Contacts for individual users, we’ve been hard at work on bringing additional, business-specific features to help you and your colleagues get in touch with contacts more easily. Now, you can:

• Add new contact information that will default to “Work” instead of “Home” field types
• View contact details from the domain directory together with the contact details that you’ve added yourself
• Add contacts from the domain directory to your “My Contacts” list in a single click
• Manage groups more easily by quickly adding email addresses to groups, and picking from a contact’s multiple email addresses to use on a group-by-group basis
• Revert changes to your Contacts for up to 30 days in case you need to restore deleted or merged contacts, or undo an import

If you’re the Google Apps administrator for your organization, you can enable the new Contacts interface in Gmail for your users from the Service Settings > Contacts area of the next generation administrative control panel. It may take up to an hour for users to see the difference once you make the change.

Make collaboration easier today by switching to the new Gmail Contacts (and once you do, be sure to contact us with your feedback).