Manage your Global Address List

When you turn on Google Workspace Sync for Microsoft Outlook (GWSMO), your organization's Global Address List (GAL) in Google Workspace automatically becomes available to each GWSMO user in Outlook.

The GAL is a shared, searchable directory of all the users, groups, shared contacts, and resources defined for your Google Workspace domain. These same global contacts are available from the Gmail interface on the web.

By default, global addresses are shared with everyone in your organization. They include each user’s primary email address and any email aliases or nicknames. Their name format (for example, Last name, First name or First name, Last name) follows your Gmail name format settings.

If you modify the GAL in Google Workspace, each user's list is updated in Outlook, too. It can take up to 24 hours for updates to become available in Outlook or for users to view the GAL after they install GWSMO.

What's available & unavailable to Outlook users?

GWSMO users in Outlook can:

• View the GAL for all your organization's Google Workspace users, groups, shared contacts, and resources. For details, go to supported fields below.
• Search for contacts by user, group, and resource address in the Outlook Address Book. Entering the first few characters of an address in the Address Book autocompletes the top names that match an entry.
• Find free/busy information for other users and resources, such as conference rooms. You can also include free/busy information for people in your organization who are still using Microsoft Exchange. For details, go to Set up free/busy information for Exchange users.

GWSMO users in Outlook cannot view Exchange data that hasn't been replicated in Google Workspace.

Manage the GAL

As a Directory administrator, you can manage the GAL to control user information visibility in Google Contacts and other Google services. If users in your domain cannot access any global addresses in either Outlook or Gmail, verify contact sharing is turned on in the Google Admin console.

To modify contact sharing settings, you need to be a Super Admin or Services Admin, or have Directory settings services privileges in a custom role. For details, go to Make a user an admin or Create, edit, and delete custom admin roles.

Turn on the Directory

To ensure the GAL is available to GWSMO users, you need to turn on your organization's Directory and set the contact sharing settings in your Google Admin console. For details, go to Turn on the Directory and set sharing options.

Turn off the Directory

If you don't want users to have access to the GAL, you can turn off the feature for the whole organization or just an individual user:

• To turn off contact sharing for your organization, and hide all global addresses from your users, go to Turn off the Directory.
• To turn off contact sharing for a specific user, add a registry key to the user's computer. Go to Turn off the Global Address List for a user.

Note: You might also need to turn off the Directory when you first set up the Directory or to troubleshoot.

Additional Directory settings

Here's a few other Directory settings you might want to explore:

• Determine how people in your organization view email addresses: Set which email addresses show in the Directory
• Set which users are visible to other users in your organization: Control who users can find in the Directory
• Hide profiles from your organization's Directory: Hide a user from the Directory

Global address fields

Supported fields