Introducing multi-domain support in Google Apps

Thousands of organizations deploy Google Apps every day, and a challenge for some large businesses has been migrating employees on multiple domains. Until now, companies that ran into this issue could either set up other domains as domain aliases or set up different Google Apps accounts for each domain, neither of which was an ideal solution. Now there’s a better way: multi-domain support in Google Apps.

Multi-domain support is a new admin control that allows organizations with two or more domains on Google Apps to manage them from a single control panel. Users belonging to different domains within an organization keep their domain-specific email address but can see coworkers from other domains in the organization’s global address book. It’s also easy for users to share across domains in Google Docs, Sites and the rest of Google Apps. Matt Vandenbush, director of IT strategy and architecture at Brady Corporation, says, "Multi-domain support in Google Apps lets us administer our entire organization from one central place. Considering that we have users on 88 different domains, this is a big time-saver for our IT department, and it lets employees from different parts of our organization share information much more seamlessly than before.”

This feature is available now to Premier and Education edition users at no additional charge. To learn more about multi-domain support on Google Apps, please visit our Help Center or join us for a live webinar on Tuesday, July 13th at 9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT.

Posted by Will Smit, Software Engineer, Google Apps

The City of Los Angeles on Going Google

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Kevin Crawford, Assistant General Manager for the City of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency. Kevin was part of a team of technology executives that chose Google Apps six months ago to support the city's 30,000+ employees and 44 different departments, from police and fire to transportation and more. In the past, Kevin has served as CIO of Sound Transit, senior manager of IT infrastructure at Port of Seattle, and support manager at Weyerhauser. Kevin shares his thoughts about how the US's second largest city has gone Google in perhaps one of the most-watched technology deployments in recent memory. This post is a follow-up to the initial blog post on the City of LA from Randi Levin, CTO.

Kevin will speak at a live webcast this Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 2:00 PM (EDT) | 11:00 AM (PDT) Register today.

The City of Los Angeles currently faces a $400 million deficit, but from a technology standpoint, we still have to provide advanced tools to 30,000+ employees and 44 different departments – technology is vital to the inner workings of the city. Running a city of this size requires people to work together, from designing and operating public facilities to policing the streets.

At the city’s Information Technology Agency (ITA), we are responsible for managing all of the City's enterprise applications – including email. Up until about six months ago, we had an aging, on-premise email system. Our Novell Groupwise system didn't work on some mobile devices and we had to enforce inbox space quotas that City employees found limiting.

In addition to providing better collaboration tools and remote access, we also needed archiving and disaster recovery capabilities to safeguard information. Disaster recovery precautions are especially important in this part of the world where earthquakes are not a question of if, but when.

We looked at 15 different proposals and went through extensive due diligence, finally gaining the City Council's unanimous buy-in with a 12-0 vote in favor of a proposal from Google and CSC. We found that Google Apps provided the richest, most cost-effective and efficient communication solutions. That was six months ago. Since then, we've worked with CSC to implement Google Apps City-wide.

By ITA estimates, Google Apps is saving Los Angeles $5.5 million over five years by allowing us to shift resources currently dedicated to email to other purposes. For example, moving to Google has freed up nearly 100 servers that were previously used for our existing email system, which in turn – an unanticipated benefit – is lowering our electricity bills by hundreds of thousands over five years. Los Angeles found Google's system availability of 99.9% and service levels for response in the event of an issue to be equivalent – if not better – to what we could provide ourselves. In short, this decision to go Google helps us safeguard information and get the most out of the city's IT budget.



Because we are such a large government organization, people are eager to hear how our deployment is going. We also built a Google Site to help us easily provide updates on the process and gather input from our user base. We'd be pleased to discuss the progress we've made in the six months since we unanimously decided to go to Google Apps. Please join me for an interactive webinar!

On switching 30,000 Employees to Google Apps
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Time: 2:00 PM (EDT) | 11:00 AM (PDT)


Posted by Serena Satyasai, The Google Apps Team

Do you have an informative and fun Google Apps story to share? Please submit it here.

Konica Minolta has Gone Google

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Cathy Lilli, Director of Infrastructure Services for Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. (Konica Minolta). Konica Minolta Business Solutions is a leader in advanced imaging and networking technologies for the desktop to the print shop. Cathy's team recently spearheaded the company's switch to Google Apps. Today, the team reports that Google Apps not only provides email, but also integrates collaboration, security, and spam blocking – all while freeing the entire IT department to spend more time on forward-looking enterprise initiatives.

Cathleen Lilli serves as Director of Enterprise Infrastructure Services where she leads the corporate teams responsible for Data Center Operations, Network Services (Data and Voice), Client Services (Help Desk and Desktop Support), and Messaging & Security. Christopher Henry serves as Manager, Messaging and IT Security, where he is responsible for the management of the corporate messaging group as well as the Coordination of all IT security activities.

Cathy will be joined by Chris Henry, Manager of Messaging and IT Security on a live webcast this Thursday, June 17, 2010 2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT. Register today.

At Konica Minolta, we had an aging Lotus Notes®/Domino® messaging environment along with other messaging platforms in the mix supporting 6,000-plus users across all of our U.S. locations, and it was time to make a change. Our users were dabbling in Microsoft SharePoint®, and they were adopting their own instant messaging tools. We wanted to make collaboration tools available to everyone by default. And we wanted an easy way to keep the business moving forward with future innovations.

On the IT front, we no longer wanted to spend a significant amount of time on constant tactical chores like server updates, storage management and patching. The on-premise environment was too cumbersome to maintain and was pulling away our focus from strategic initiatives that would provide more business value. We also had to find an easier way to integrate multiple corporate acquisitions (we had just acquired Danka and had to merge 2,000 users on multiple messaging platforms into our infrastructure).

We already had positive experiences with cloud-based solutions such as Postini for anti-virus/anti-spam protection, ADP for payroll, and a CRM. Our main goals from the outset were to:

• Better meet our user requirements, especially regarding ease of use and collaboration
• Simplify IT management
• More easily integrate acquisitions

With Google Apps, we saw that we could get a powerful, low maintenance- and complexity-free email solution plus innovative collaboration tools that would have cost extra in Microsoft® Exchange or Lotus Notes®/Domino®. But, we had to convince our parent company that Google Apps was the right choice since they were on a Microsoft® Exchange environment. We had many discussions and we did a lot of due diligence, particularly around Google's security expertise and policies.

We created a requirements document, and we talked to several large enterprise customers of Google Apps. At the time, we were completing the Danka merger and it involved shutting down a data center, so things in IT were pretty hectic. Despite these complicating factors, the switch to Google Apps went smoothly and with almost no complications. Today, Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. Inc. has benefited significantly. We can:

• Provide not just email, but also collaboration, security, and spam-blocking all in one solution
• Deliver genuine, bottom-line value to the business, driven by continuous innovations from Google
• More easily integrate new acquisitions like Danka
• Align our activities to help drive Konica Minolta's business forward

We did not make this decision lightly and the IT team had many internal discussions about our role going forward in a cloud environment. Staff questioned, if we're not responsible for the servers on a maintenance basis – what will happen to our jobs?. But I can tell you, on top of owning messaging, we still have other apps to manage and run the data center - in other words, we have plenty to keep us busy. From our point of view, we couldn't be happier that we made the decision to migrate to Google Apps.

It has been so rewarding to move from an internal infrastructure for messaging that was cumbersome and challenging to support – one that was not getting us anywhere in terms of having a forward-looking impact on the business – to one that allows us to start delving into strategic initiatives.

Whether you need to integrate acquisitions or deliver more value from enterprise IT, we have a lot of perspective and lessons learned that we'd be pleased to share with you. Join us for this live webcast:

Konica Minolta on transforming Enterprise IT through Cloud Computing

http://webcasts.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=1825337

Thursday, June 17, 2010

2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

Posted by Serena Satyasai, the Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Notes®/Domino®.