Single Sign-On, Directory Bot and More Comes to SherpaTools

January 25th, 2010 → 11:43 am @ Michael Cohn // No Comments

Thank you to everyone who has been active in the SherpaTools beta program. Your feedback has been invaluable as our team continues to develop the platform. Today we’re proud to be rolling out a number of new features, including Single Sign-On, Directory Bot and Import/Update for User Profiles and Shared Contacts, as well as an optimized user interface.

Single Sign-On with OpenID

Security and privacy is a top concern for every Google Apps customer. To minimize your risk, SherpaTools no longer requires your Google Apps administrator credentials to use our application. Instead, we have implemented Single Sign-On using Google Apps as the OpenID identity provider. What this means is that as long as you’re logged into Google Apps, you can access SherpaTools seamlessly, with authentication happening under the covers.

Directory Bot

Have you ever been on the road and needed a colleague’s contact information, only to find that you don’t have them in your personal address book? Directory Bot is a new end-user feature in SherpaTools that provides easy access to the Google Apps corporate directory from any Google Talk chat client, including the integrated Gmail client, Google Talk, and perhaps most importantly, Google Talk mobile applications. To enable Directory Bot for your domain, follow the instructions on this help page.

Update/Import for User Profiles and Shared Contacts

If your organization has tens, hundreds or thousands of users, it can be a cumbersome process to update User Profiles and Shared Contacts manually. SherpaTools now provides templates and offers a simple update/import process for you to manage the corporate directory in bulk.

Optimized user interface

This release also features an optimized SherpaTools user interface in accordance with best practices for building scalable web applications. SherpaTools now makes heavy use of Ajax and Google Web Toolkit (GWT), providing the user with a faster, more responsive application and a better overall experience.

Thank you again to those who have been in our beta program from the beginning for your feedback. Please keep it coming. And for those that have been patiently waiting to join the program… read the next blog post.

Tags: Directory Bot, Export, Import, Shared Contacts, SSO, User Profiles