Is anybody using Google apps for their students

[reggiep]

I have managed to iron out all my problems with google apps and now have it set up and synching my students across.

Now what?

Any users out there have any tips or pitfalls that I need to look out for before I move our students across to it?

thanks

[Oops_my_bad]

Have to say, it's been pretty smooth for us, only thing we stumbled upon when doing testing was also planning for everyone to reset their passwords so they could be hashed and sync'd with Google

Good luck No regrets here.

Thus far..

[reggiep]

Thanks Oops, Did you limit which domain students could send mails to? I'm a bit worried that if it is abused we won't be able to track trace what has happened!

[enjay]

Working okay here, only really using Mail and Calendar though, none of the other Apps. We don't currently have password sync/SSO set up, but I do intend to revisit that when we get our new Server 2008 server in the summer, doesn't really seem worth doing it on S2003 now.

Groups are tedious to set up, annoying that aliases (e.g. info@school.co.uk) always appear in the address book. Students are divided into Primary and Secondary, with Primary kids only able to mail internally; Chat is enabled (internally-only) for staff but not pupils, although we may extend this.

It is a chunk of time to get up and running, but once going, everything is great. Staff like being able to access it from iPhones and the like.

[CyberNerd]

Now what?

Training !

oh - and don't lock your admin account out !

Also, I noticed today that spreadsheets now do pivot tables ! hurrah

[enjay]

Oh, one other REALLY annoying thing - the lists of users and groups are presented alphabetically, 30 at a time, with only a 'next page' button to move through the list, which is really tedious when you want to get to the end of the list (you can search for a particular user, but not a group). Also, it has a 'next' button but no 'previous', only 'first' so you need to be careful as you get near to where you're going, because if you miss and go to the next page by mistake, you have to start over from A again.

[enjay]

Ha, ignore that - just noticed they've changed that, and there is now a 'previous' button! That is one good thing about Google Apps, it is clearly a growing and evolving product, so I'm confident that some of the other things which aren't ideal (e.g. Google Groups, which hasn't really been adapted for a corporate environment) will get fixed at some point.

Google's support people are excellent too, all issues I've raised have been resolved by quickly, sometimes in the first response from Google.