How to Share Google Contacts with Other Gmail Users

Whether you are a Google Workspace, G Suite or a regular Gmail user, you may be wondering how to share Google Contacts the same way you share Google documents or Google Calendars. We’ll explain here the 2 most efficient ways :

The Rich Experience: Share Contact Labels (or contact groups)

This method, using Shared Contacts for Gmail plugin is the most popular and easy one, since it allows to :

• Share multiple address books (or contact labels) with other co-workers or other Gmail users
• Assign permissions (for Instance you can decide who can view, add or edit the shared contacts)
• Share contacts with groups of several users at once
• Synchronize the shared contacts with mobiles phones and even Microsoft Outlook
• See logs of who updated/shared the contacts
• Restore deleted contacts

How to Share Your Google Contacts with your colleagues:

On complement on this guide on how to share google contacts with their contact manager, here is a quick an actionable 4-steps guide that will get you all set in minutes:

• Step #1: Make sure you created your Google Contacts labels in which to organize your Gmail contacts.

• Step#2: Install Shared Contacts for Gmail plugin from their shared contacts manager signup page or from the G Suite Marketplace Contacts Sharing page.
• Step #3: Select the label(s) you want to share and add the users or groups you want to share them with.

• Step #4: Assign permissions. You can define if you want these users to be able to share these labels, edit the contact, add new ones or simply view them.

• That’s it! Each user you shared the group with will then be able to see and update these shared contacts, according to their permissions.

The Restrictive Experience : Google Contact Delegation feature

This method is quite straightforward but provides a limited experience.

To use the Google Contacts Delegation feature, you must:

1. Open Google Contacts.
2. Click on the Settings icon and click “Delegate Access”
3. Select the people you want to give access to

This feature is very limited for the following reasons:

1. You can’t share your contacts outside your domain.
2. You can’t limit sharing to a Contact Group. You have to share all of My Contacts.
3. You can’t create your own Contact Group that includes emails from the shared group.
4. You can’t create a new contact and add it to the delegated group
5. If you do a search in your address book it will search the delegated con

You can learn more about the Contact Delegation Feature in this article.

Find more here:

• How to share Google contacts with other Gmail users (Flash Issue)
• How to share Google contacts (Smartcloud)
• Read the article I wrote on Linkedin about contact sharing