Making Your Own Google: Google Apps
Want simple, powerful communication and collaboration tools for your organization without the usual hassle and cost? Ok, I stole that. That’s the pitch from Google. I was curious so this week I did some investigating.
I host my own email. While I liked the web email client I was using, it wasn’t quite as good as Gmail, and it surely did not have the features I was able to integrate with this tool.
This week I undertook the conversion. I gave my most trusted information, my email, to Google. I felt scared at first, but they have yet to do me wrong and I am very happy with the results.
It began with simply signing up for the service and verifying that I do in fact own the Philoking.com domain. I decided to do this by uploading an html file with very specific content but you can also do it with some custom dns records.
Once I had done that, I started setting up the services. They begin with some aliases so you don’t have any downtime with email during the switch. After I had completely set them up, I went into my domain control panel and set up four custom mx records to tell my domain host where to find my email now.
Within an hour, it was getting my mail via Gmail and loving it. I set up POP access so I can still get my mail through Apple Mail, and then I began to explore the service more.
Of course with Google you get Docs, Calendar and GTalk too. Once I started playing, I created my own custom landing page, apps.philoking.com, I created my own aliases to mail, calendar and Google docs, and I am really enjoying the services. I had used the services before of course, but tied to my own domain is very convenient.
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Good luck with the move. Hope it goes well. Wish I could convince my work place to switch to Gmail but its a 8000 strong company and I am just one man.
I am curious why you use POP instead of IMAP since it was released. Does Google Apps still offer that option?