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Re: [school-discuss] Google Mail tips
Hi Laura,
When we did our migration 18 months ago from FirstClass, we did comprehensive evaluations of Microsoft Exchange 2010, Zimbra (the full collaboration suite), Google Apps for Education, and Microsoft Live@EDU. Our conclusions were as follows:
FirstClass - We had to leave, this was just a terrible platform, and the vendor was atrocious to deal with, Outright lied to us several times on fixes and enhancements.
Exchange 2010 - When combined with a Microsoft Desktop, the eCAL, and the extreme discounts afforded to education, there simply was no better combination.
Zimbra - Close second, but to get something that competed with Exchange you had to go with Zimbra Pro (I think it was called Enterprise before VMware purchased it). But the education discounts were not very good to be perfectly honest and the collaboration part would have cost just as much as our end to end Microsoft platform.
Google - Tied with Microsoft Live@EDU. I have a love/hate relationship with Google. They are becoming the new Microsoft from 15 years ago which is dissappointing. I like their tools, but increasingly to get the full google experience you need all things google which essentially means Chrome. I feel like shortly they will start making things only work on ChromeOS or Android forcing people to move away from Microsoft and Apple. The two biggest issues we had though was the poor integration with Active Directory (and the moving "student data" into the cloud), and at the time we were doing the evaluation google had experienced several large scale public outages.
Microsoft Live@EDU - Essentially this reduced to hosted exchange. We might actually still move out students into this in some sort of co-hosted (staff in house, students in the cloud) model, but there was no significant cost savings. There still isn't much cost savings to move out students to the cloud because administration would still be the same, and only a tiny incremental portion of hardware would be saved.
Being the head tech guy, I would push your tech department to get Chrome out as as standard, or at least a dual standard. There are now active directory extensions so it can be managed almost as well as IE8/9, and with a competent tech group there are not many applications that must run in IE (some activeX sites still require it). There is little reason to not run two browsers *if* you can educate your end users. Right now we run Firefox and IE, but we are about to stop supporting Firefox and swap it with Chrome. Our education push happens later this fall.
As for using IE with gmail, I have not found any problems at all. Disabling compatibility view pretty much resolves any issues at all, and make sure your flash and java are current is all that should be required. I have found that some VLC plugins have recently been causing me grief with Chrome indirectly causing Flash to crash, but I don't quite understand why. I can repeat this with tools like uStream on demand,,, removing VLC resolves it.
Finally, have you considered the actual Gmail tips? They have some pretty good stuff on there, not to mention the icons for the ninja make me smile every time. :)
On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 12:23 PM, L Michaels
<lmemsm@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Our school District just switched from a proprietary mail system (using Microsoft Exchange and Outlook) to Google Apps for Education and Google Mail. While this should have been a positive switch since Google seems more interested in cooperating with Open Source applications and using open standards, so far the experience has been fairly difficult. We have far less functionality than we did with Microsoft. Also, from what I've heard from other schools using Google Apps, they just don't have their IT departments attempting to lock down the system like we do here. For instance, they're using Postini to block spam and not only is blocking spam, it's blocking some valid messages interchanged within the District and giving no indication to sender or receiver that the information is not going through. Also, Google Chrome isn't yet among the officially allowed software within the District, because some of our systems can't work with that browser, so access to Google Mail within the District is by IE 8 only at this point. To deal with the various difficulties in switching over, I've been trying to compile some tips and work-arounds for using Google Mail and even writing some code to make up for a few deficiencies when I can.
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Was curious if anyone else was using Google Mail. Would appreciate sharing or exchanging tips on it. Would also be interested to hear if anyone's using Open Source applications (other than browsers) in conjunction with Google Mail and how that's working out.
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Here's a link to the tips, tricks and code I've been compiling:
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Anyone have other tips to share or other resources they'd recommend for workingÂwith Google Mail? Thanks.
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Sincerely,
Laura
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