LlamaLabs

I’ve been collecting notes about my experiences with Google Apps Premier (The service where you pay $50 per seat). It includes Google Mail, Calendar, Documents, and Sites.

Yesterday’s outage reminded me of my list and I wanted to get around to posting it.

Hopefully these notes will be useful to someone who is evaluating Google Apps for their email/calendar/docs solution.

Without any specific order, here are the notes I have collected.

There’s no way to enforce communication over HTTPS through the admin control panel.

Before the recent announcement of the option to require https, by default you would be redirected to http://mail.google.com after signing in. With employees working remotely, not being able to force communication using HTTPS was a real bummer. There is now the option to always use HTTPS in Google Apps Premier. It’s still possible to switch back to plain old HTTP once logged in.

Here are a few pages discussing the issue. It’s no really such an issue anymore, but they are in my notes, so I’m including them here.

• Using SSL/HTTPS for Gmail and Google Apps.
• Google Apps for Enterprise missing full-time SSL?
• SSL on Google means Semi Secure Links
• Fix A Problem > Need to be able to enforce the use of SSL

You are forced to go through the Google Checkout process to add new seats

There’s no easy way to add a new user account without going through the Google Checkout process. If you’re purchasing single seats each time you have a new hire, that means that you need to go through the Google Checkout process in addition to adding the account. You could avoid this hassle by purchasing seats in advance.

Ideally there would be an option to charge the credit card on file. It’s already stored in the account used for Google Checkout, so why not automate the process?

Can’t forward one user’s email to another user in the same domain

So, when someone leaves the company, and you need to forward new messages destined for her account to her supervisor, you’d usually put a forward in place.

When I try to do so in Google Apps I get the message “Forwarding to Google Apps hosted email addresses is not supported”. I’m not the only person having this problem.

I’m able to do so by logging in as that user and putting the forward in place under the user’s Gmail settings.

I’ve been going back and forth with Google Apps Premier support for a couple weeks now attempting to troubleshoot this issue. I’m assured it’s a problem specific to my account.

Disabling account access.

When you change the password for an account, it does not invalidate existing logged-in sessions. If the user is logged in, she will be able to to still use her account.

Why not suspend the account? That disables logging in, and will log a user out after several minutes, but it also blocks incoming mail to that user.

A third option is to log in as the user and click the “Details” link that is part of the account activity messaging. That opens a pop-up that shows you existing logged in sessions and gives you the opportunity to log those sessions out. It would be nice if that feature was in the Admin control panel.

Unreliable IMAP

I don’t personally use IMAP for my email, but there have been confirmed cases of messages being delayed for 20+ minutes when using IMAP. The messages will show up instantly through the Gmail interface,
but in an external mail reader the new messages won’t show up. YMMV.

Some messages silently ignored during migration

If you use their IMAP migration tool (Which is very handy), you may notice that some messages (containing zip files) are not migrated.

Support

It’s been hit and miss when dealing with Google Apps Technical Support.

Customer: We're having problems checking mail using IMAP.
Support: Which web browser are you using?


The online documents are nice.

Feature Suggestions

Make sure to take a look at the Feature Suggestions to make sure some critical feature you require isn’t in the pipeline.

Google Groups not included

Before signing up I looked into whether or not Google Groups was one of the included applications.

Pine Star said:

Hello everyone interested in this integration:

I had a chat with the Google Rep of Commercial (paid) version of
Google Apps yesterday.
He said they are going to release a “Premier” edition of Google Apps
by end of 2007 that wil have Google Groups integrated.

So, they are also thinking on these lines….

If you’re looking for Google Groups for your projects in Google Apps Premier, you will be disappointed to find out that it’s not included.

We were really hoping to have it so we could have archived discussions for projects.

Email Lists

You can create email lists that deliver to multiple recipients, both members of the domain and external email addresses.

A couple notes on the lists.

• No subject prefixes.
• No List-id field.
• Not as cool as having Google Groups included as an app.

Calender Importing

Aside from using the API, there appears to be no way to import an entire calendar into a new instance.

Branding with a Custom Logo

You can define a custom logo to be displayed instead of the default Google logo.

Conclusion?

Like any service, Google Apps Premier has its pros and cons. Research thoroughly before making the leap.