12/30/08 - 6:47 pm
Are you ready for a Google Apps pilot?
If you’re seriously thinking about trying Google Apps for your domain, here are some first-steps for starting a Pilot group:
- Determine the size of your pilot group. Ideally, you’d want this to cover all user-types in your company. That way you’ll be able to note the differences in individual work-flows and also identify someone who can help others when you do the final move. The user mix is dependent on how big your company is and how many different perspectives you need to help form your implementaion plan.
It is important to let people in your company know that this pilot will be happening and to expect to see some changes in the way emails from these pilot users are going to look. - Sign up for the free-trial of Google Apps Premier and start creating your users. Once you do this and complete the necessary DNS steps, email sent to this domain name and email addresses will be caught by Google Apps.
By default, Google Apps will only keep and deliver email for the users and email addresses you’ve created through the admin console - it will discard all the rest. If your existing email server handles the email for this domain name and you still want email to be delivered to that server, you can tell Google Apps to forward the email it receives to your server in a couple of different ways: by all unknown recipients, dual delivery, and passive.
- All unknown recipients - If Google Apps doesn’t have a record of a certain email address, send the email to your primary server.
- Dual delivery - If you want the email sent to your pilot users to also be sent to their email accounts on your existing server, you can set individual Google Apps accounts to deliver the message to both their Google Apps Inbox and their account on the primary email server.
- Passive Delivery - You may also skip their Google Apps inbox altogether and deliver it directly to the primary email server.
- The trick is to get email to be delivered from your existing email server and users to these Google Apps users.
In Exchange, you can create a contact for each of your pilot users that has their Google Apps domain email address and set their Exchange account to forward all mail to the Google Apps email address. Then under their Google Apps account, you can set it up so that they are able to send as their Exchange email address (That is if you’re using a different domain name than your regular one). Note that doing this will usually cause spam filters to tag their email because the message is coming from a server that is not registered as the mail server for your Exchange domain.
You can also setup routing on the Exchange server to deliver the mail for unknown recipients--for a domain name where it is the master--to another server. However, this is a bit tricky and in my experience has resulted in some mail being rejected by the Exchange server.
Once you know all your email is being routed correctly, you can breathe a sigh of relief. Email not getting to users is one of the biggest and most stressful steps of a pilot program or migration to Google Apps. From here on out, you can start focusing on the next big thing: Calendars, FreeBusy visibility, and Contacts!
Don't miss any posts! Subscribe to our blog feed or only posts by Anthony Suda.
Short URL: http://sundoginteractive.com/e/3082
Comments
We’re reviewing the dual-deliver pilot option… One thing that sticks out is “Sent Mail”... If a pilot user is sending while using gapps, how does that sent mail get copied into the user’s exchange account?
Thanks!
That is the trick. When we went through the migration, we just had to deal with Sent Mail in two places. The old sent mail in Exchange and all the current sent mail in GApps. There was no way to make the mail sent through Gmail to get into the Exchange server.
But let’s think a little about this… Technically, the Gmail account can be fully accessed via IMAP just like a lot of other email providers…
So if you’re wanting to save the emails that your pilot users are going to be sending, you’ll have to probably do something like this (unless there’s another app or something out there that will do this automatically - I haven’t found one yet):
1. Have them open Outlook and add their Gmail account to their Exchange Profile (There’s a good how-to here: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/internet/gmail/add-your-gmail-account-to-outlook-2007/ )
2. Then they’ll be able to see their Exchange folders and their Gmail folders in the folder list in outlook. They can then drag the [Gmail]\Sent folder to their Exchange Sent folder to start copying the messages into the exchange server.
I suppose the reason there isn’t an app for this yet is that most people assume that a company id just going to make the switch from Exchange immediately.
Leave A Comment