A better way to manage Google Apps

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 

Comments

[Chris Alvarez]

Is there a way for just a few of us in our company to be using Google Apps? We may eventually switch everyone over, but for now it is just the five of us (out of 25 or so). My understanding is that once you switch the MX Record, it means EVERYONE is affected. Any ideas how we could go about this?

[David Hoff]

You can definitely use Google Apps for a few users in conjunction with your existing server; this page has details on how to set it up with Lotus Notes or MS Exchange; other systems would work in the same way.

[valtrex online]

Can I use Google apps as my mail server and host my webpages on another server?