Joe’s Amazing Technicolor Weblog

We already had a serviceable in-house email server, so why change? In no particular order,

• Cost savings. We’d been spending $1k+ annually on postini’s spam protection service alone, which Google Apps conveniently bundles in for free. Also a maintenance contract on the email software, depreciation on the server, electricity
• One less server to manage
• Far superior webmail and group calendaring to what we’ve been using

When first thinking about doing this conversion I talked to a bunch of people whose organizations were already using google apps. Nobody really had any complaints. Given the upside, I certainly don’t feel like I’m in a position to complain, either, but I thought it’d be worth mentioning a few issues I encountered:

• I applied July 22nd for nonprofit status, and heard back (in the affirmative) on August 5th. Fortunately, it’s entirely possible to switch over with just a standard account, but I wish I’d applied earlier and not had to worry about whether or not that was going to go through.
• While it’s nice that there’s an open source LDAP solution for syncing user accounts, it has had some issues and even when working it only handles people’s names, email addresses, and passwords. At the time I was working with it, the best bet was to use the latest tarball, into whose directory I had to copy the above-mentioned file. Even after that, I continued to have enough trouble to abandon ship — was quicker to do the work by hand than to fix the bugs.
  In case anyone’s also trying to hook this tool up with Apple’s Open Directory, I had some initial luck with the following:
  Command: set ldap_url LDAP://servername.example.org
Command: set ldap_base_dn dc=servername,dc=example,dc=org
Command: set ldap_user_filter (objectclass=apple-group)
  though it doesn’t look like anyone’s worked through the mapping from Apple’s schema.
  Beyond just working stably, it would be great if group membership could be used to configure mail lists — I see that’s listed under possible improvements (bottom of page). I’ll try to take a look at that some day & see how feasible it would be to work it in.
• Transferring old emails is a pain if you’re not on a mainstream email server (raise your hand if you’ve heard of Stalker Software’s Communigate Pro). We’re doing it by setting both the old and new servers up in the same email client & copying messages over through it, but then we lose the date emails were sent / received.
• I couldn’t find any way to turn on IMAP access across the board, so I did a lot of logging in & setting people’s account preferences. This wouldn’t be a big deal if it weren’t for the old email transferring issue mentioned above.
• While it’s possible to create an email list containing all addresses in the domain, only admins can send mail to it; to get an all-staff list, I had to actually type everybody’s address in. More motivation to work on the LDAP group-to-list mapping mentioned above.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 11:37 am and is filed under Tech Stuff with tag(s) email, google apps, nonprofit. Both comments and pings are currently closed.