by Johanna Bates, Technology Manager, Community Partners

[Ed note: This is the first in a series of articles by Johanna Bates, chronicling her organization's switch to Google Apps.]

Google Apps. For free. Huh. I wasn’t too sure what it would do for us, but a free Google upgrade? That feels like a free box of money. After reading Sonny Cloward’s blog post, I was intrigued. I figured, “What the heck? I’ll apply and explore the possibilities.”

The application process was very simple, and Google got back to me in a few days to let me know that we’d been given the free “Education Edition” upgrade that is now available to non-profits. I set to Googling to find out more about what I could do with our Google Apps account. The calendar is nice, but we’re happy with Airset. Google Docs leaves much to be desired over our preference for online collaboration, Basecamp. But we could turn our email server into a Gmail server. Now that sounded interesting.

A little background: we ran our own Linux POP email server with the help of an offsite, part-time server admin, and we’d had some problems. Several members of our small, six-person staff travel a lot. We couldn’t set our email up for web access, nor had we had any success running a decent auto-responder for when people were on vacation. To solve these problems, we were often forwarding email to personal Gmail accounts. In addition, our spam filters were doing the best they could, and we were still inundated with spam. Eudora and Thunderbird filters were keeping about 30% of our spam out of our inboxes, at best.

Suddenly, it seemed that using Gmail for our own domain’s email would solve so many problems. Gmail has one of the best spam filters I’ve seen, plus easy forwarding and auto-responder features, not to mention the easy web-based email access. And our staff could use Eudora or Thunderbird to POP Gmail, so they wouldn’t even have to alter their workflow if they didn’t want to.

Following help instructions, it took about five hours to set everything up so our email domain could become a Gmail domain. I then configured everyone’s desktop email programs to POP Gmail. This took a couple hours of fiddling, but started working fabulously and left all the spam behind in the Gmail user interface.

In less than a day, we all had beautiful, spam-free inboxes, which is the major “pro” on my pros list. Speaking of that list:

Pros

• Beautiful, spam-free inboxes!
• Staff members can individually control email forwarding and auto-responders themselves.
• Web-based email access in the awesome Gmail UI.
• We don’t have to worry about maintaining an email server.

But our week has not been completely free of snags.

Cons

• Our Executive Director is unable to POP a Google Apps Gmail account from his Blackberry. Apparently, this has been a problem with the Apps Gmail interface making many Crackberry addicts unhappy. The Blackberry can easily POP an ordinary Gmail account, so we’re forwarding our E.D.’s mail to a non-Apps Gmail account for now. It seems that Blackberry and Google finally worked this out, but our Blackberry contact had no idea about “GPOP,” and Google didn’t respond to my email. We’ll be trying this fix again soon. But… frustrating!
• The Eudora Address Book does not export nicely into Gmail.
• When there’s a problem with Gmail, it’s almost impossible to contact a human for help. This feels a little unsettling, to say the least.

For now, the pros outweigh the cons. I’ll post an update in a few weeks.

Community Partners works to improve access to health care in Massachusetts for low- and moderate-income residents. Based in Amherst, Massachusetts, CP uses Internet technology to help bring outreach workers together so they can better serve their clients in need. We aim to share what we learn with others in the human services and non-profit sectors so that we can all do a better job of helping people. CP has been involved with NTEN since, well, it's been a long time.