Google Apps – Round up

Well biggest decision of this year (at school!!) was what to do with a aging Mail Server and should we go Google School. Finally the decision was really made for me as: 1. Staff and students were already using personal gmail addresses to collaborate on work 2. Richard was pushing, pushing, pushing….. and 3. The old mail server started to ‘lock up’ periodically and needed several ‘restarts’ (while holding my breath) to get it back fully ‘online’.

So after deciding that educationally it was a good idea to move all 1200 users and even if we decided to move to another mail server we were going to have to migrate everything anyway ….we did it!

Was it painful ……?
Tech side ……well not really it takes a couple of hours to setup the correct settings from the gmail, then some mucking with dns entries to get everything pointing the right way, then email away to them to get recognised as a educational institute ….tech side done.
School side …..Migrating users especially email inboxes etc would be painful but we just talked to the staff said that we would run the old mail server in parallel for a month and they were to look at this as a good chance to clean up their email. This went down fine with the understanding that we were happy to work with them to make this transition as easy as possible. This worked well and we have had no issues with this approach at all.

Problems

• IMAP speed issues with attachments ….none? ..others have noted this but we haven’t ..not sure why not ..must just be lucky!!! LOL
• Gmail doesn’t like to be ‘polled’ continously ( seems to think its an attack)  so by limiting how often this happens this has disappeared.
• Gmail uses flash to upload multiple attachments and this proved to be an issue with our internal proxy …took a bit of ‘tweaking’ but all sorted and staff now happy.
• Issue with syncing user information between our LDAP (AD) server and GApps is a ongoing one ..we have found this application works well from Google ..for all things except passwords due to the format AD stores them. So we are manually having to do this. Anybody with magic bullet cure for this …let me know!

Positives

• Email is reliable, spam is better than before and virus protection built in …all great!
• Educationally staff are continuing to find ways of uses collaborative tools weekly ..if not daily …from class projects to faculty planning …again great!
• We haven’t had to replace a dodgy server!!

Concerns

• Bandwidth is important …bring on the Loop with pairing to Google!! We have 12mbs down and 5mbs up ..and its working damm well ..less might be an issue
• Data Caps …. we have noticed an increase in data use as classes are using Google docs to work collaboratively ….but surely well worth it educationally and it will take something like 2 years to equal the cost of a new server …even if we were to double our internet usuage!!

Some ‘Comments’ I have heard…

• Why would you want to use Google Apps and give them your data – they are just another Microsoft in sheeps clothing – looking at world domination!! – I just don’t see that as the case …its a free service and it works great lets use it!!!
• Who ‘owns’ your email/docs? …personally I don’t care !! ..cloud computing is a concept we need to understand …you back up what is necessary but otherwise its very convienent ..and I’m all for that!
• what happens if Google goes belly up ….HELLO …if Google goes down I think we will have more to worry about than our email!!!

Well must believe in it ..I’ve now ‘helped’ migrate six schools and this is the full ’round up’