Google Apps Webinar

I signed up at watched a Google Apps Seminar today.  It was for IT admins (which I am not), but I wanted to have an understanding of what needs to go into rolling out Google Apps for our school.  One thing I now know is that I need to know more.

The topics covered were: Organizational Layout, Mail Flow, User Provisioning, Data Migration, and Authentication

Organizational Layout:
Making sure that you have groups setup in order to set policies for different users.  For example students to use gmail but the teachers still continue to use exchange.  In order to do this it is important to have a seperate domain name for students.  Teachers would have seymour.k12.wi.us  but what should we give to students?  students.seymour.k12.wi.us  that seems logical but is a very long address for the students to remember and they already don't like to use email because it is so slow and cumbersome vs texting.

Mail Flow:
My understanding is that teacher email would be unaffected but I will need to research wether we need to have student emails archieved.  If they do then we may need to set up and use postini? I don't know our school's policy so research will be needed.

User Provisioning:
This is my biggest concern!!!  Who is going to update and maintain all the users. I know I do not want to type in 800+ users.  They did talk about using a CSV file to upload but then at the end of the year you need at add more users and delete graduating students and who is going to take the time to do that (not ME).  They did discuss the use of active directory sync to manage users and I strongly feel that is route to go.  I don't know how that will integrate with PowerSchool so again more research.  Another plus of active directory sync there doesn't need to be anyone with a work ticket to reset passwords when a student forgets it (which is all the time).

Data Migration:
Ok, by this point my mind was wandering.  But who is going to migrate the contacts/calenders?  Does it go to to the users to do?  Or does the IT department do  it.  There are pluses and minus to each.  If IT does it all data is migrated even if it is old and isnt' used, and you are only limited by your bandwith size. Users migrating means that they have to understand what to do, which is training.  I think we need to do more technology training, but not this type of training.

Authentication:
You can either authenticate using Google Authorization or SAML 2.0 SSO (I don't know what the second option is).  I like the thought of using Google Authorization because you can log in anywhere using any Google login site.  That means on your mobile device or any Google page that has a login.  I did get that the second options was for organizations that wanted to security and passwords on their servers.  It seems like more work to me.

The end of the presentation suppose to be about Wisconsin Google Apps for Education but there was a problem with the presentation.