Google Apps Updates as of August 31st, 2010

Some of you know that the school I work at uses Google for our email and collaboration platform. I've used used many different email systems in my career as a school technology coordinator - Eudora client (not sure what powered this system), Exchange, FirstClass, and now Google. Without a doubt, Google's platform is superior for empowering both individuals, teams, and large communities. Whereas exchange and MS Office are all about individual productivity, Google is all about team productivity and hyper-collaboration. 

One of my favorite things about the Google platform is the regular updates the Google Team pushes out to the platform. Yesterday during our faculty meeting I did a 25 minute update on some of these new features-in reality, many of these features are not exactly new, but for many who attended my session yesterday this was their first exposure to the updates. 

Click here to view the document titled, Google Apps Updates as of August 31st, 2010.

...and I almost made it through an entire blog post without mentioning the cost of the Google platform :-)

Webcast: Moving to Google Mail/Google Apps for Education

This was a skype conference call that we streamed out to a ustream channel today on the topic of migrating to Google's enterprise mail system. We had a handful of other schools who have either made the decision or are pondering the decision to move toward Google for school/district mail hosting. We had a bumpy start early on in the conversation, but then things even out and I thought it ended up being a worthwhile experience.

As a side note, this enterprise collaboration/communication network is given out to K12 public/non-profit schools for free. More on Google Apps for Education here.

Thanks to all who contributed and participated!

Further resources and links:
Chat transcript from the ustream chat.

Resources passed along to us from our Google Apps Rep:
Top Ten Reasons to Switch to Google Apps/Mail
Who owns the data, security, and privacy issues...this document addresses these questions quite well. To quickly boil this one down, the school owns the data.
A six week migration strategy
Google Apps Education Edition FAQs
Other education organizations who are using Google Apps Education Edition

Google Sync - Sync your Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts with your phone

I just set up my iPhone calendar and iPhone contacts to sync with my google calendar and gmail contacts. This is exactly the kind of functionality that I was looking for...I now have the ability to update my calendar and contacts on either my phone or my google account. WARNING: If you do this, be sure to backup your iPhone contacts to whatever desktop address book application you use on your computer (I use Apple's "Address Book").

This process also works with their Google Apps network, which means contacts and calendar information from your school's google network will sync in the same way. This is good to know as we're very seriously considering moving from our current email communication suite (FirstClass) to Gmail and Goolgle Apps.