Google Apps rollout over Summer

[MrWu]

Hi all

 

I am hoping to rollout Google Apps for my school of 1400 users.

 

I have successfully configured Frog for SSO but unfortunately it does not integrate with Google Drive.

 

I am looking at maybe using GADS to create users, I am reading through the docs but any gotchas ? Is it just a matter of installing GADS and syncing with my OUs (they are neatly setup by year groups) also I am using a separate domain (ie school staff sticks to the original school domain and students use the new domain for Google apps and gmail) would this be an issue? Or should I stick to Frog SSO and wait till they integrate Google Drive properly?

 

Thanks as always

 

Wil

[robjduk]

GADS is a pleasure to setup really. just don't do what I did and forget to save the carefully created profile. Personally I don't see why you would want to separate the domains up but I have been drinking a little and maybe missing something.

[seawolf]

Gotchas are to be very careful with your sync rules for creating, suspending, and deleting accounts. We have some OUs that contain accounts we only use for authentication and not email, so those shouldn't be picked up by GADS, etc.

 

We use two different email domains for students and staff. We used to have a single one, but then we had the problem of people guessing staff email addresses and students receiving email meant for a teacher (ghhhrrr). The two domains solves that problem, but not the ignorance that caused it (guessing, not asking).

[robknowles]

Hello,

 

Like yourself, we use FROG and previously used the FROG/GOOGLE SSO option but was limited by its lack of support for GDrive etc.

 

Anyway, I installed and configured the DirSync and Password Sync tools and killed the link within FROG for the generation of user accounts this way. Seems to work very well this way and we get the full functionality of everything.

 

Thanks,

 

Rob

[MrWu]

Thank you all

 

Yes the reason having two seperate domains are:

 

Our existing school domain is already being used for Exchange and staff will stay with that email domain

 

We did not want staff or students with same email domain name to avoid confusion and errors

 

Will look into GAD and GAPS...

 

Is there any performance issues loading GAPS on all the DCs? Always a bit worried about adding third party stuff on DCs.

 

Our Google Apps domain is mwschool.co.uk and my schools main domain is mrwuschool.co.UK..I presume when GAD is run it will generate users [email protected] and users log on with the Google aoos username and their AD password?

 

How do you manage the address book for teachers and students? Do you upload students Google address book into Exchange or do you setup a Google apps email address for teachers too so communication is done entirely through google between teachers and students?

 

Thanks as always

[seawolf]

I haven't seen any performance issues with GAPS, although I have seen some potential issues in using it with multiple AD servers (it worked reliably with 2, but not 3 for us).

 

GADS will sync whatever OUs you specify and it will create user accounts based on the email address you put in the email address field of the user in AD. This is how we are able to use the same GADS to sync users for two different domains.

Edited July 22, 2013 by seawolf

[MrWu]

Thanks seawolf

 

So if our students have no email address field in AD (they have a VLE email address that is separate and we are phasing out) would Google apps just generate student [email protected] as email and username if the domain mwschool.co.uk is the primary domain for google apps?

 

Thanks

[caffrey]

No it would just ignore it, only creates accounts with an email address for the user (well it does for me using gads)

[MrWu]

Thanks caffery,

 

So if the AD entry for students are blank, when I run GADS against it, it will still create a google app account with the username and a gmail account? in my case would be [email protected] (google apps primary domain)

 

 

Cheers!

[caffrey]

Nope if it's blank the account won't be created, you get a sync report so you know if it's worked or not.

I just have to remember instead of going to exchange and creating a mailbox, I need to fill in the email address in the general tab in AD.

Best bet is just to play, and use simulate sync in GADs. The biggest issue with me to sort out was the groupings - GADs doesn't appear to like mail enabled security groups, especially if they are nested - I just redid everything in AD first.

[seawolf]

Nope if it's blank the account won't be created, you get a sync report so you know if it's worked or not.

I just have to remember instead of going to exchange and creating a mailbox, I need to fill in the email address in the general tab in AD.

Best bet is just to play, and use simulate sync in GADs. The biggest issue with me to sort out was the groupings - GADs doesn't appear to like mail enabled security groups, especially if they are nested - I just redid everything in AD first.

 

Nope, GADS doesn't handle nested groups in my experience either. Kind of a pain, but you just have to deal with and move on. Doing a simulated sync is definitely recommended before doing the real thing. If we hadn't done that, we would have deleted half of our users in GApps with our first sync attempt (had a few sync rules out of whack).