Google Apps: Full Review

Well, everybody, I promised to do a more full review of the Google Apps for Your Domain features, so here it is.

About a week ago, I began to seriously look into getting my own domain name for my blog; my first thought was Google Apps, because they will register a domain for free, and host it very cheaply ($10/yr). In addition to having my own domain, I would have my own branded versions of Gmail, Calendar, Docs and Spreadsheets, Google IG, and Page Creator (turns out that Page Creator and Docs and Spreadsheets don't get to have my custom logo...).

I did it, and here is my story. How the domain registration works is you ask for a domain, and it registers it for you via Enom. Through this entire process, you don't even see Enom; just Google, which enhances the experience quite a lot. It is paid for, of course, via Google Checkout. Once this is done, it will give you your new domain with a Control Panel, where you can add, remove, and edit services:

From the Control Panel, you can add and remove users too. It gives you 200 users to start with, but it looks like if you run out you can request more. How the different services work is that it creates a CNAME in the DNS settings for each one, creating a subdomain. These subdomains redirect to *.google URLs (e.g. 'mail.verani.net' >> 'http://mail.google.com/a/verani.net/').

For the website itself, you need to use Google Page Creator (although, there are some hacks to get around this). You have to set up the address of Page Creator pages to be whatever subdomain you want them to be. I chose 'www'; ergo, my homepage is at http://www.verani.net.

What about adding a blog? I, of course, wanted to add a blog, but since I was now paying for this service, I also wanted to be able to make some money, not have to pay money. Because I would have to pay money to map my Wordpress.com blog to the new domain, and it still wouldn't allow Adsense, I would have to use Blogger. Now, in the olden days, I switched from Blogger to Wordpress, because Blogger was basically crap compared to Wordpress. Now, Blogger has a lot of new features, and is catching up very nicely with some exclusive features of its own. Since Blogger is free to map to a custom domain, and it allows easy Adsense for revenue, I chose it as my blogging platform.

It is in theory quite easy to map a blogger blog to a Google Apps registered domain name. You would go to the Google Apps Control Panel, go into Domains >> Advanced DNS Settings, and then login via the provided link to Enom, with the provided username (your domain) and password. Then, it allows you to edit the CNAME entries:

From here you would put the word 'blog' or whatever under Host Name, put 'ghs.google.com.' (with the period at the end) under Address, and make sure Record Type says 'CNAME (Alias)'. Then, you would go into your regular Blogger settings >> Publishing, and from there, switch to a custom domain. Then, put 'blog.whatever.net' or whatever you chose, and within a few hours, your new domain should work.

Now, this is what is supposed to happen, in theory. In reality, when I added the blog subdomain CNAME into my DNS settings under Enom, and hit save, all of a sudden all the original CNAMES and stuff disappeared. This meant that all of the Google services and anything that was on my domain was now inoperable. I completely freaked out, and tried to fix it myself, but I had no luck. I contacted Google support, but didn't get any reply. This left me very frustrated with Google. I did, however, contact the google-related support at Enom, and I got a reply within six hours. The email said:

Hello Ioannus,

We were experiencing a bug with the access.enom.com interface that deleted the Host Records when adding new one's. We apologize for the inconvenience that we caused you. That issue was fixed just today.

I have put your settings to the default that was set up when Google registered your domain. All the MX records as well as Host Records are exactly how it was when your domain was registered.

It could take up to 24-48 hours for your domain to resolve correctly. It usually takes much less than that, but it can take that long.

Regards,

adam | eNom Advanced Domain Support __________________________________ eNom, Inc., a Demand Media company GoogleClients@enom.com

Sure enough, when I checked it out, everything was as it should be. That time, when I added the blog CNAME to it, it worked perfectly. Within a short while, my blog was working!

Mail One of the features of Google Apps I like is the ability to make all the users eachother's contacts in Mail. This makes communication across an organisation easy. Mail is basically just like Gmail, but with your own logo:

Calendar Again, like Mail, Calendar is basically GCal with your own logo:

Docs and Spreadsheets D&S is a little bit of a disappointment, b/c the logo doesn't seem to apply to it; perhaps this is because it is such a new addition to the Apps.

Start-page: The start-page (once I customised it) looks like this:

The start-page editor is pretty nice; it allows you to add a header and a footer, change colors, add default gadgets, create text-based gadgets, etc.:

One thing I want to see with the start-page is a new Google Talk Gadget that works with Apps For Your Domain. That would be extremely useful to me.

Page Creator Page Creator is part of the site that is only accessible for administrators. You have to go into the Control Panel to get to it. Here is what it looks like:

This page on the web (www.verani.net/publiccalendar) looks like this:

Third Party Products For sites that allow virtual domain mapping, it is really easy to integrate them with your website. As a test of this, I made a Wetpaint Wiki, and made it so that it is hosted at wiki.verani.net. What you do is go back into the Enom DNS settings and add a CNAME record where the host is the subdomain you want ('wiki'), and the address is the url of the original wetpaint wiki ('something.wetpaint.com.'), of course, followed by a period. Then, in Wetpaint settings, use the map to custom domain feature, setting it to 'wiki.whatever.net' or something. Within five minutes, mine was completely up and running. Here it is:

Conclusion Google Apps is definitely the way to go if you want a really cheap website with web-based groupware integration, if you are relatively computer literate, and able to handle temporary crises (such as my DNS problem).