Mt. Gilead’s Experience with Google Apps for Domains – Part I

Posted on February 23, 2009 by paschott

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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