{"id":398,"date":"2007-03-30T20:00:47","date_gmt":"2007-03-30T19:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.devco.net\/?p=398"},"modified":"2009-10-09T14:12:26","modified_gmt":"2009-10-09T13:12:26","slug":"google_apps_for_domains_part_i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/archives\/2007\/03\/30\/google_apps_for_domains_part_i.php","title":{"rendered":"Google Apps for Domains part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few of my clients have indicated an interest in moving their mail to Google Apps for Domains<\/a>, for those living under rocks it’s basically GMail hosted on your own domain. It combines Google Docs (Spreadsheet, Word processor), Calendar, Google Talk and a few other services into one.
\nSo I setup a a test domain a while ago to do a proper evaluation but not against their pay version using the free service. The idea is if the free version is passable but not fatally flawed then the paid version should be fine.
\nIt’s been painful to say the least. First I mistakenly set up a domain that I shouldn’t have since it was already in use and I couldn’t migrate it, my mistake. I figured I’ll be nice and let them know of this and get them to shut it down – a useful exercise since if you do decide to move to them and later want to move away, what you don’t want is your domain in limbo on the Google servers with possible mail routing from inside Google to it and not your real domain.
\nSo first I try and change the primary domain name, can’t, you can add other domains, but it’s impossible to change the primary domain. So I contact them and ask them to shut it down. They contacted me saying no problem, all I need is to send them the PIN code I can get inside the control panel. The thing with these PINs are they keep changing often, so an ex staff member for example can’t claim to be working for you since the PIN won’t be valid anymore, nice feature.
\nProblem is it takes them longer to respond to support requests than PINs are valid for. So the process goes as follows:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Ask to close domain\n
  2. Get asked for the PIN, supply the PIN\n
  3. Support people checks your PIN, it’s not valid anymore because they took too long to check it.\n
  4. Get asked for PIN, supply the PIN\n
  5. Go back to 3\n<\/ol>\n

    That’s just pathetic. Combine this with shoddy level of service, there has been several well published extended downtimes in the first month alone and other weird outages. Yesterday for example I couldn’t access any attachments since some automated bot decided I did something wrong and returned a “Lockdown in sector 6!” error, amazingly descriptive that is, needless to say I never heard from support on this issue.
    \nThere are other deep rooted issues as well like with the feeds out of calendars etc, but more on that later. I’ll make a few posts here over the next while with my experiences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A few of my clients have indicated an interest in moving their mail to Google Apps for Domains, for those living under rocks it’s basically GMail hosted on your own domain. It combines Google Docs (Spreadsheet, Word processor), Calendar, Google Talk and a few other services into one. So I setup a a test domain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[50,10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":558,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions\/558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}