As a Google Apps administrator, you can push email settings out to your users. For some settings this can be done in the Google Apps Control Panel, for others it’s only available through the Email Settings API.

But in the majority of situations, after you push email settings out to your users, any of those users can usually simply go into their Gmail settings and cancel your change.

With FlashPanel’s scheduling and enforcement, you can tell FlashPanel to reapply your email settings policies on a regular schedule. So for example, if you push out an email signature to a group of users and one of those users changes their signature, that job can rerun every 24 hours and reset the user’s signature.

Google Apps has its own data store where contacts are kept, called the Global Address List (GAL). Shared Contacts are a part of this list. When you create or upload Shared Contacts in FlashPanel, we use the Google APIs to edit the GAL. However, Shared Contacts can sometimes take as long as 24 hours to appear in this because of how Google re-indexes this list.

It’s not always 24 hours — sometimes its quite a bit sooner — but it’s rarely immediate. So, even though the newly-created Shared Contacts are visible in the local FlashPanel datastore right away, it can be a day before your users see them in their type-ahead lists in Gmail.

FlashPanel enables additional functionality that is available through the standard Google Apps Control Panel, such as shared contacts across the domain, enforceable email settings, granular Drive sharing policies and calendar management tools.

A Google Apps administrator is the primary person responsible for managing the company’s Google Apps account. This person almost always has the role of “super admin” within Google’s permissions set.

A Google Apps administrator typically handles account management (provisioning and deprovisioning users), contacts management, Groups management, training and support for new users, and choosing complementary software such as modern browsers and third-party applications from the Google Apps marketplace.

Easily manage rich user profiles and your company’s directory from one central location.

Create and apply customized email signatures across your company or for groups of users.

Discretely set up granular monitoring of emails, chats and drafts for any user in your domain.

FlashPanel offers a customizable workflow for user deprovisioning, complete with our suggested best practices, to use when someone leaves the company.

Set and enforce everything from IMAP/POP to labels, filters, auto-responders and more. View all email settings tools here.

You can create users, groups, Org. Units and more from one central location.

Your own Google Apps assistant that retrieves directory information and broadcasts messages through Google Chat. Check out Apps Butler.

FlashPanel gives you the tools you need to upload and manage a list of external shared contacts for your entire domain.

Quickly and easily delegate a user’s inbox to another user from FlashPanel.