Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Google Apps Team Edition: extending an older domain with new services

Google has a version of Google Apps aimed at "teams" inside corporations who want to be able to collaborate beyond the limits of their IT department.

Welcome to Google Apps

Collaborate at work with Google Apps Team Edition.

  • Work on the same document together, instead of sorting out changes in attachments
  • Share documents and calendars securely with your co-workers with a click
  • Access it all from any computer, and even from mobile phones
  • Invite other team members to join and share with you

The trick is that Google Apps Team Edition can be setup without anyone demonstrating control over the corporate domain, though if you do demonstrate domain control then you can have more admin controls.

Using Google Apps would, of course, be cause for termination at many companies.

It has a safer potential use, however, as a way to extend an existing domain service.

An existing domain, like, for example, faughnan.com. I've long owned that domain; it's registered with Network Solutions and the DNS functions are managed by lunarpages. Through lunarpages I get the usual web/email/ftp services. The web pages are mostly legacy documents now, in part because they're published from a FrontPage 98 repository living on an old XP box.

In the past 10 years, I haven't come up with anything better. Google Sites, though, is interesting. It doesn't have many of the capabilities of FrontPage 98, but it has some other advantages. Most of all, though, a Sites collection is accessible from anything that can run Firefox/Camino/Safari/IE

It took only a few minutes to create a Google Apps Team Edition add-on for faughnan.com. The login name is my old faughnan.com email address and I've created a "Site" with a temporary address: http://sites.google.com/a/faughnan.com/faughnan-com-extension/Home

The next step will be to to ask Lunarpages (alas, they don't give us direct access) to add a CNAME pointing to whatever I end up calling this Site. After that point any web extensions on my Google Apps Team Edition site will appear to have an address like abc.faughnan.com

I'll post on how well this works - or doesn't work!

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