Lubavitch Educational Center (LECFL)

When RJF International Corporation decided to make the move from Microsoft Exchange to Google Workspace, the whole staff was excited to switch to an innovative solution that proves to be as simple and user friendly as the tools people use at home. It was also generating a real gain of productivity and substantial savings. However, even if Google Workspace was proposing them a suite of top notch productivity tools, one missing feature was likely to compromise a swift migration: The shared contacts. There was no such thing as sharing Google Contacts!

A lot of their users were sharing address-books in Outlook / Microsoft Exchange and it was unacceptable for them to give up this functionality. Of course, Google Workspace offers the possibility to manage a central GAL (Global Address List), but this GAL is automatically shared with the whole company, and we cannot restrict its access to some users. Moreover, the shared contacts of the Google domain Global Address List do not appear in the Gmail Contact Manager or in the users’ mobile devices, users have to search them and cannot modify them. It was therefore impossible to really “collaborate” on shared contacts.