Google has a neat new feature out for Apps customers – both education and work – that will make it easier to set up a lot of user accounts, especially when initially signing up for the Google-flavored corporate productivity suite.
The new feature, called Account provisioning for Google Apps and demonstrated in part above, allows Apps customers to create accounts based on configurable patterns. What this means is that if you wanted everyone in your corporation to have a domain formatted like t.maxwell@youremail.com, where 't' is the first letter of the persons first name and 'maxwell' is the last name, you could create a pattern that looks like [C1_firstname].[lastname], input all of your users' names like above, and then Google would automatically format them to your pattern. Customers can also ask the service to generate multiple available usernames and choose the one they prefer.
The implementation of this technology is also available as an open source API under Google's GitHub account so anyone can implement it into their own apps to generate available usernames.
WordPress.com