Saturday, August 28, 2010

Transferring the mnspecialhockey.org domain - what remains of Google Apps

The last step of the mnspecialhockey.org migration took place at DreamHost. The provide an optional mixed hosting service. I had some files in a traditional ftp site on a DH server, but also Gmail and Google Apps via Google.

From their control panel I turned off the Gmail and Google Apps connection. (See the posts list below for my prior action).

Then, since DH was also the registrar for mnspecialhockey.org I switched to the new DNS servers. I'll update this post if I learn what really happens to the data that was at the old site.

See also (note, some are old)!
Update 8/29/10: After the transfer

The mnspecialhockey.org domain now points to a new site. What happened to the old content?
  • sites: they still exist! The URLs are of the form: http://sites.google.com/a/mnspecialhockey.org/sites/system/app/pages/meta/dashboard 
  • docs: they still exist! The URL is of the form: http://docs.google.com/a/mnspecialhockey.org/#all
  • mail: it still exists for my account (I removed the others) with URL: http://mail.google.com/a/mnspecialhockey.org/?tab=om#inbox
In fact, I can still manage the domain using the URL

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/mnspecialhockey.org/Dashboard

So I have, at least for the moment, answered the question about what happens to Google Apps content when the original Google App Domain is gone. Turns out, it persists. Even the Domain settings persist (Google Apps thinks the domain is still mnspecialhockey.org, even though it no longer references this site).

If this remains true, it shows there's only a loose coupling between a domain-associated Google Apps suite and the domain itself. 

That's rather nice to know. It's not completely surprising however.

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