Mt. Gilead’s Experience with Google Apps for Domains – Part I
Posted on February 23, 2009
As most small churches have very little money allocated in the budget for e-mail short of what comes with a basic hosting plan, I wanted to share our experiences with Google Apps for Domains, from our planning phase to implementation, and through our current usage at Mt. Gilead Baptist Church.
1. Where we were
Prior to our migration to Google Apps, we depended on the e-mail solution provided by our hosting provider. While it worked well for a lot of things, we felt that our ability to manage and work with our e-mail was not very efficient. Our church was considering changing our hosting provider to a new company that would work better with our website CMS and provide a little more storage so we would not keep bumping up against space limits. However, that left us with the problem of how to proceed with our e-mail as all accounts, mailing lists, and management were handled by our hosting provider. At this point, we began to explore our options – setting up personal e-mail accounts, setting up e-mail with our new host, or hosting with a 3rd party. Having read some information about Google Apps for domains, we decided to explore that as a possible solution.
2. Exploration of Google Apps – benefits, drawbacks, extras
Obviously one of the major concerns with using a solution is whether it will meet your needs sufficiently. Our needs:
1. E-mail hosting
2. Easy Web Access for e-mail
3. Integration with existing e-mail tools, Outlook in our case.
4. A small learning curve.
5. A calendar for internal schedule coordination.
Google Apps offers 3 different editions – a Free edition, Business/Enterprise edition, and a Non-Profit edition that is essentially the same as Enterprise, but only available to non-profits. We started at the Welcome site to get more information. Looking into the messaging offerings (e-mail and IM), we found that we would get 7 GB of storage per user, 25 for non-profits/enterprise and would meet Requirements 1-3 above. From my prior experience with G-mail, I realized that there would be a small learning curve for our users, but nothing insurmountable. Requirement #5 is met through Google’s Calendar solution and details can be found here.
Of course, there’s more to Google Apps for Domains than just e-mail and calendar apps. They also include Word Processor, Spreadsheet, and Presentation software, and basic web page editors mostly intended for internal use called Google Sites,
Testing It All Out
Of course, I wanted to test this out before actually migrating our church to it; therefore, I signed up for a personal domain for myself and began the sign-up process for Google Apps. This used to be an easy process for “Standard” users because Google offered one button for Free and one for Premier. The Standard edition link is now much smaller. Both signup links can be found here. However, if you’re trying out Google Apps for yourself before making any recommendations, you can get started for your personal domain here. This will take you to the “Standard” edition page to sign up.
At this point, you will have an option to buy a domain name or enter one you already administer. I had already purchased a domain name so used that. You’ll need to provide some basic information, including the name of your organization and other information necessary to work with the domain. Choose your administrator account name carefully as you can’t change this once your account is set up. I probably would have chosen differently had I known this ahead of time.
In order to start using Google Apps, you need to prove that you own your domain. You can do this by uploading a special file to your web site or by creating a CNAME DNS record to create an alias that points to Google. Either way, Google will be able to verify that you own the domain pretty quickly after that and you can start customizing your configuration.
I quickly added CNAME aliases for the various services Google provides, mostly using defaults buy customizing some where I thought it made more sense for my use. For example, docs.mysite.org is aliases to ghs.google.com and will direct anyone using that DNS name to the Google Docs area of my Google Apps. Google provides very clear instructions for different DNS Management tools to help you out. I was quickly able to migrate most of my settings over to Google Apps, including e-mail for my domain (which was new to me so I didn’t have any down time to worry about).
After some testing with my account, I was ready to make a plan for our church to migrate from our hosted POP E-mail solution over to Google Apps. I’ll provide more details for that in my next post.
Coming soon…
3. Migration process to Google Apps, (focus on e-mail)
4. Current usage of Google Apps
5. Other benefits of Google Apps for the small church
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9 Responses to “Mt. Gilead’s Experience with Google Apps for Domains – Part I”
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Glad you’re doing this series. It’s an excellent option for churches.
I’ll chip in as you post the rest of the series.
I’ve helped 3 churches make this transition and each one has has their joys and gripes. I also went down the personal domain route and “converted” my wife and kids over to Google Apps.
On an unrelated note, you might consider using the Intense Debate Wordpress plug-in for commenting. I started using it on my blog and it’s pretty sweet.
I look forward to the help. I only have my personal and church experience to speak to so I welcome other experiences.
I’ll ping the rest of the team about Intense Debate. I’ve seen it elsewhere, but am by no means a WP expert and thus defer to those more knowledgeable than I in that area.
I’m using the intense debate plugin on my blog and even though I don’t get that many comments, it does make things much easier to view threads, etc.
Nice post as well – looking forward to part 2 …!
Google Apps has so many benefits especially for small churches who can’t afford other solutions. We’ve been using it for some time now and it works wonderfully. It provides our power users with an awesome webmail and calendaring experience with mobile device support and our less tech-savy users just use Outlook and don’t know the difference. We’re even beginning to use the Google Calendar API for our next website to pull event information from a Google Calendar and post it to our Special Events page on our website.
Also, make sure you check out the Push Calendar and Push Contacts support that they’ve added for phone’s that support Exchange, its pretty snazzy too!
You should see my article for Christian Computing Mag coming up in next month on using Google Apps or other docs for online Bible Study. Be looking for it at ccmag.com. Thanks for the great web site too. Looking forward to reading it.
I’m not seeing the Non-profit edition anymore…it wants you to enter the number of users and stuff for the enterprise edition…
Guess I should have checked that a little more and thought I’d included it in my notes. When you’re on the Business page, there’s a very small bit of text that says “Not a business? Explore Standard Edition” with a link to the Standard Edition. It used to be quite a bit easier to get to that edition, but it doesn’t actually make money for Google.
Just did a quick check – the non-profit edition is considered the “Education” edition now.
Check this page for more details check the link under the “Signing up” section to request an upgrade to the Education edition if you’re on Google Apps already.
https://www.google.com/support/hosted/bin/answer.py?answer=139019
For our purposes, we’re just on the Standard edition because it meets our needs and doesn’t require a lot of paperwork to be sent back and forth.
[...] been a while, but this post is long overdue. In the prior post, I primarily discussed the basics of getting started and evaluating Google Apps for Domains. I [...]