Google Apps Best Practices

In the interest of helping others get off the ground more quickly (and less painfully), I thought I'd post a few lessons that I've learned with Google Apps.  

1. I can't stress this enough:  Make sure that when you create your google apps domain, you are using the final base domain name that you plan on using.  Even if you are running a pilot or proof of concept that isn't using the final domain name!  There is no way to change the domain once its been created.  A best practice is to create a sub-domain under your primary domain once you've got the everything setup.  Don't worry that you can't verify the primary domain; you can setup the sub-domain as an alias, and that works just fine.  
2. I'd suggest that you don't use Google integrated DNS system.  If you use Google's DNS (enom), there isn't a way to remove it.  I suspect that this will change over time, but right now this is a hard and fast rule.  It's especially an issue of you are going to use this domain as an alias for your primary domain.   In addition, the integrated DNS options don't let you create sub-domains, which can be a challenge if you plan on using them for split or dual mail delivery or even just a pilot project.
3. There are several domain alias names that are restrictied.  I couldn't find this anywhere in the documentation, however when I tried to setup the following, they all failed:  exchange.mydomain.com, apps.mydomain.com, googleappsgeek.com.  I suspect that apps, google, and exchange are restricted keywords so just keep this in mind when you are planning your enviroment.
4. Finally, make sure that you have your user names right.  There is no way to "rename"a user; the only way to change a user name is to create the new user and then import all of the email and calendar data over.  It's pain, and the user will lose any personal address book contacts.   When I get the time, I'll post a quick how-to on do this. 
5. Be very careful deleting users.  Once you delete them, the account goes into limbo for 5 days.  This can create some problems.  To catch the mail, setup an alias for another user to use the deleted user's email address name.   

Google Labs

If you're a Google Apps user, and you're not already using Google Labs, you should check it out.  If you're already using it, check it again, because they are constantly releasing new features.  Below are list of the ones that I find very useful.  As always, keep up to date on new features on the Gmail blog:  http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/ 

• Canned Responses - Email for the truly lazy. Save and then send your common messages using a button next to the compose form. Also automatically send emails using filters. 
• Forgotten Attachment Detector - Prevents you from accidentally sending messages without the relevant attachments. Prompts you if you mention attaching a file, but forgot to do so.
• Signature tweaks - Places your signature before the quoted text in a reply, and removes the "--" line that appears before signatures.

If you want to enable Google Lab within your Mail account, click on the "Settings" link at the top of the screen.  Look for the tab called "Labs" on the far right, and you'll see a screen like the one below.  Lastly, there's a nice disclaimer on the features: 

If (when) a Labs feature breaks, and you're having trouble getting into your account, there's an escape hatch -- just go to http://mail.google.com/a/your-domain-here.com/?labs=0 and Labs will be temporarily disabled. 

Google Apps Automation

Google Apps is a great product, however, if you're in charge of managing a domain that has more than a hundred user's, it can be cumbersome to manage with the default dashboard.  On a recent project, I had to setup 500+ email groups and even more nicknames.  Even the task of just finding who was listed in a group called "sysadmin" took about 20 clicks and screen refreshes to view.  

API to the rescue?  As part of the Google Apps Premier Edition, you get access to the user provisioning API, which is cool, but not immediatly useful.  If you dig a little deeper on the API documentation site, you will see that they've also provided JSP based application, packaged as a WAR file.  

What's nice about this is that it's completely self-contained, and you can run it from your local machine.  It's a very rudimentry application, however it exposes all of the features of the API in a web browser.  Just download a copy of Tomcat, and drop the WAR file in the webapps folder, start things up and you are off to the races.  

The application doesn't have the ability to process CSV files of users or groups, but you can accomplish this by using the free iMacros for Firefox extension.  I've included a sample script below that will automatically create user alias to help get you started.

VERSION BUILD=6070918 RECORDER=FX    
'Based on a two column csv file called alias.csv file, this script will create the nicknames in bulk.
TAB T=1  
TAB CLOSEALLOTHERS
CMDLINE !DATASOURCE alias.csv
SET !DATASOURCE_COLUMNS 2
SET !DATASOURCE_LINE {{!LOOP}}
URL GOTO=http://localhost:8080/AppsProvisioningSample/createNickname.jsp
TAG POS=1 TYPE=A ATTR=TXT:Create<SP>Nickname      
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=ACTION:http://localhost:8080/AppsProvisioningSample/ProcessNicknames ATTR=NAME:username CONTENT={{!COL2}}
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=ACTION:http://localhost:8080/AppsProvisioningSample/ProcessNicknames ATTR=NAME:nickname CONTENT={{!COL1}}
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:SUBMIT FORM=ACTION:http://localhost:8080/AppsProvisioningSample/ProcessNicknames ATTR=VALUE:Submit

If you've got any questions or comments, please feel free to post them below.  If you're interested in services for Google Apps, please visit my company's website at www.cloudsherpas.com.  

Enjoy,

David