>We are a small, private high school in Colorado looking at Google Apps
>as a possibility for our email needs for both staff and students. Our
>students are either competitive skiers/snowboarders or participate in
>our foreign travel program in the spring. In both cases, email
>communication with them is important.
>
>We'd be interested to hear from any schools who are using Google Apps
>and are specifically interested in the following areas:
>
>1) did you set up your own domain or use a Google Certified company to
>help you and if so, who?
We set things up ourselves. If you have a good knowledge of SMTP and DNS I
see no reason to pay for help, otherwise it's probably a good idea to get
some outside help. When we migrated we offered a 3 month optional early
migration period over the summer prior to our mandatory cut over early this
September. The transition from routing mail through our old mail system to
routing it to Google went without a hitch or lost email.
>2) Any issues with setting up your domain or email accounts and any
>advice you could give about set up
We did not try to migrate old email to Google mail. Instead, we decided to
leave the old server running for one year beyond the cutover giving users
easy familiar access to their old mail. This has worked well. We will
provide faculty with a copy of their old mail file on CD/DVD before we
shutoff the old server.
>3) how you created your distribution lists and whether or not the lists
>are working for you
Distribution lists are working fine. The one negative is that Google's stock
tools for maintaining these lists are pretty lame. However, given the size
of your school this shouldn't be a problem. On the positive side, Google's
API is pretty easy to use and so we created a simple ASP-based list
management page that works for managing our larger lists.
>4) technical support issues - if you had them, did Google respond
>appropriately
I've been pleasantly surprised by the responsiveness of Google tech support.
This is the one thing I didn't have high expectations for but Google has
responded well to the several tech support requests we have made.
>5) any complaints you might have about the service - is it appropriate
>for high school students, etc.
We looked at Google Apps since it was Gmail for Domains several years ago
and did a lot of homework and testing before switching so there really were
no surprises and the switch has met all of our objectives. That said, gmail
is different and some users are having difficulty getting used to the Google
way, especially those who have developed complex folder structures to
organize mail--beyond a few dozen labels Google's label system becomes
unwieldy, kind of like this sentence ;) We have really pushed the "search
don't file" paradigm but old habits die hard and for some folders are still
a better method. I know there are various Google skins that nest labels to
help get around this, but I'm very leery of recommending a non-Google skin
to solve a problem. I'm fine with users choosing to use a non-Google skin,
but IMHO to recommend is to commit to support.
One of the reasons we switch is to position ourselves as smart phones grow
in popularity. It was very difficult for us to support all the various new
phones that came out, but with Google we are at the cutting edge with zero
effort! While this benefits all users, this particularly benefits students.
>6) any concerns you might have about spam handling or security
If you can afford it I strongly recommend Google/Postini for anti-spam and
archiving. The archiving feature is nice not only for e-discovery, but with
the archive feature users can recover their own email even if they delete it
from within their Google account.
I can't speak to the standard Google spam filters as we've used Postini from
the beginning so most spam gets stopped before it even hits the user's
Google account.
I know security is a concern for some, but I really don't see why. First,
Google offers an option to force an SSL connection for email so all traffic
is encrypted. Furthermore, while we certainly give attention to making sure
our servers are secure, Google has an army working on nothing but security
so there servers are far more secure than ours could ever be. Lastly, I
actually did not like the fact that since we hosted our mail servers I
could, with a little work, read others email undetected. The fact that this
ability even existed I saw as a negative. Now with Postini archiving we have
better access to all email if we need to look, but everything is logged so
there is no way I can look without there being a log that I can't touch.
This protects everyone.
>7) suggestions for us of any kind in using calendaring, video
>conferencing, collaboration, or other features of google apps.
I recommend focusing your support resources on supporting email and calendar
and let the other apps grow organically. I use Google Docs for many things
and could see it playing a significant role in a few years, but currently it
really isn't a threat to Microsoft Office. Once the world decides on OOXML
and/or ODF and these formats settle down I think Google Docs will be more
tenable as a workhorse application.
Google Sites is a cool tool when someone/group (e.g. a student group) comes
to you and wants to setup a web site. In the past we would give them a URL
and point then to Dreamweaver, but the learning curve for this is too steep
for many. I'm also not a fan of Contribute as I think it is rather clunky.
Google Sites offers a perfect solution for these situations.
We've experimented with Google Video. It's OK, but the cost isn't trivial
(it is currently free in beta) and there are downsides. We want to avoid the
Internet bandwidth hit for videos intended for an internal audience and we
have some other solutions for videos intended for an external audience.
--
Tom Phelan
Director of Technology
Peddie School
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