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

Posted on April 27, 2009 by paschott

It’s 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 realize that I actually left out some of the drawbacks of using Google Apps. The Church IT Roundtable group has discussed this in more detail. I want to bring up a couple of those arguments before continuing in order to help you decide if this is the right solution for your group.

Possible Disadvantages of Google Apps

• * If you want to back up individual email boxes, you will need to obtain a separate solution to do this or work with the IMAP/POP access to download your messages locally.
• * You do not have any administration over individual messages or mailboxes outside of changing passwords. You cannot delegate access to another account or a group of accounts. For some people, this is really important. The most Google Apps lets you do is change a user’s password or tell people to share passwords. I’ve seen hints that there may be a little more functionality in the Enterprise edition, but have not personally tested that.
• * Setting up a shared calendar for everyone in the domain takes a little bit of work, though it’s gotten easier in the recent months. Setting up resources such as rooms is quite a bit more difficult than doing the same in Exchange.
• * You are at Google’s mercy for backups and restores. If you host your own email or use a dedicated email host, you may have more granular backups.  On the flip side, if you host your own email, you’re responsible for the backups so this may even out for some people.
• * Our biggest limitation – trying to send out to a large number of email addresses for bulk mailings. Google has an upper limit of 100 distinct email addresses at a time and 500 distinct email addresses per day per account.  That means that if you want to send out an email to a larger congregation, you’ll be better off with using a dedicated email service or some other notification method.  Google Apps will definitely run into some limitations.  You’ll know that the emails failed because they’ll all come back with a “failed permanently” message.
• * In order to enable each user’s POP or IMAP access or to set auto-replies or forwards, you need to log in to each account. I wanted to be sure that people were set up with IMAP access and that certain accounts had an auto-response on every email. Having to log in to each account to set this bothered me a little from an administration standpoint. Using multiple browsers helps some, but it still takes some extra time. I hope the administration side grows as Google Apps gets more popular.

For our purposes, the administration is a little awkward, but we have a small number of users. The limitations on how many emails we can send per day affects us only when we’re doing a new program or holding a new event. Other than that, the benefits far outweigh the negatives. With all of that being said, I wanted to concentrate on the next areas of concern in our migration process.

3. Migration process to Google Apps.

  For most people, this is one of the big concerns. Your users probably have a lot of emails already stored either in Exchange or in POP3 and local stores.  If your email client supports IMAP, you could simply add your Google Apps account as a new IMAP account and then drag and drop your emails from your old folders into Gmail.  If this option won’t work, there is a Google Email Uploader that may work for you. You can find the instructions here or the FAQ here. Note that this tool is designed primarily for Google Apps email and will probably not work with a normal Gmail account.

  For our purposes, we started forwarding a copy of each user’s mail as it arrived on our old web host accounts.  That let us pick up from that point and not worry about migrating those emails. It was also easier for us than logging into each account and setting up POP access to the old servers. The older email still lives in Outlook PST files for the moment, mostly because our users haven’t asked to have them migrated yet. We definitely plan to migrate them, but nobody has even mentioned missing old emails so far.  That probably says something about our use of email, but I’d rather not concentrate on that right now.

  What will work best for you depends quite a bit on how heavily each person uses email. Some may be a simple drag and drop through IMAP. Some may want to organize everything in specific categories. Do some planning with your users and you will have a much better success rate.

4. Current usage of Google Apps

  We made it easy for our staff to use by setting up some basic aliases for our domains. Google provides some suggestions for you if you want to change their default (long) URLs to something friendlier. For example, if you use Calendar, the first option you see when you choose to change the URL is calendar.yourdomain.org.  You may customize this as you see fit, but I’d recommend coming up with something easy to remember and setting up your CNAME aliases shortly afterwards.  Google makes this pretty easy by including instructions for all sorts of DNS hosts. Just follow those to add new CNAME aliases and you’ll be able to point your users to much easier to remember addresses.

  Our primary use of Google Apps is still email. We don’t do too much planning at this time, though I’m trying to encourage at least a small internal calendar for our staff and workers.  We still set up some IMAP clients for sending more richly formatted HTML messages, especially when doing announcement mailings. Because we regularly send out messages to groups of people, we have created several different Groups within the domain management piece. This lets our church administrator define a group such as “Men” or “Women” that he can use to send announcements to a targeted set of people. Google Apps allows some control there so members may email that group, only specified people may email the group, or the group is accessible to everyone.  Most of our email lists of this sort are limited to certain owners to avoid possible abuse of the address tied to the group.  Other listserv systems may be better suited to this purpose so I’d still advise looking around at your options before choosing to set up groups on Google Apps.

  Having finished the basic configuration of Google Apps, I’ve mostly had the experience now of being able to sit back and let it run.  The worst problem we had was when our users tried to set up or access their accounts on new machines. The default CAPTCHA images are pretty hard to read even for someone used to CAPTCHAs. For older users, the images are pretty hard to figure out and I’ve had to talk people through this a couple of times. However, once everyone is up and running, I don’t hear anything about email issues. In fact, most of the users like the ability to log in easily while not in the office.

5. Other benefits of Google Apps for the small church

  So what other benefits are there to Google Apps? For our church, we’re content with just email. However, I know of churches who use the Calendar and Docs areas heavily to share important internal documents. Some set up Sites within their domain for internal use and share information through those sites.  However, the biggest benefits after email are likely to be found in the Calendar and Docs areas.

  With just a little effort, your users can set up a new calendar to plan out an event or to track vacations. They can then share that calendar easily to people within the domain so others can either see the details as they arise or even help edit the calendar events. This is a great way to ensure that your event planning runs smoothly. It can also be helpful to keep track of your staff members’ appointments and allow your office workers to help them plan out their schedules. if you want, you can even set up a public-facing Event calendar that can be pushed outside of your Google Apps users.  People can subscribe to the calendar through a URL or through RSS feeds. If you have a calendar of events that changes regularly, this may be very helpful for you.

  I’ll touch on Google Docs briefly. Google Docs includes Word Processor, Spreadsheet, and Presentation modules as well as a PDF (Adobe Acrobat) viewer. Any PDF files can be viewed straight out of your Google Apps email now and then saved if you wish into your Documents.  Most common Office document formats (Word, Powerpoint, Excel) can be viewed or imported into Google Docs, though you may lose formatting along the way so the document may not appear exactly the same.  If you just need to work on a basic Word Processor, Spreadsheet, or Presentation, Google Docs can get the job done. It’s a great way to take notes and then share them easily to your users or to save an initial draft for later work when you’re not near your normal PC.

If you want to keep up with the changes to Google Apps, be sure to follow this RSS Feed. It’s a great way of getting notifications about everything that Google is rolling out to your users.

I’d love to hear from you now. What are you doing? What questions did I not answer? How do you use Google Apps for your organization?

For Him,

-Peter Schott

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