What’s IT all about?

My testing of Google Apps continues, and one issue I have had has now been resolved. If you recall from a previous post, I had Lotus Domino handling mail, calendar and contacts for both work and personal purposes. Now that I am using Google Apps and Thunderbird for personal email/calendar/etc. I have lost the tight integration I had with my Palm Lifedrive and my mobile. But the synchronisation of calendar items between Google and Thunderbird has been solved…and the instructions are here.

OK it does not get my calendar items on to my Palm, but that’s not a major problem and I think that having my Google calendar in sync opens up a whole raft of new avenues, given it’s support for iCal and XML.

Now if only I could get contacts synchronised

I blogged a few days ago about my initial impressions of Google Apps, saying that it looked promising as a free mail/calendar/web service aimed at small businesses and other groups (families, clubs, etc.). Certainly for our particular circumstances at home it promised to ease a bit of a headache, namely running a full-featured groupware platform in a VMWare virtual machine merely to provide mail and calendar services to family members, all on a home PC.

Well, a few days in and there have been no real hiccups so far. Changing the MX and CNAME records to point at Google’s servers was pretty simple, and all changes took effect within an hour. Installing and configuring Thunderbird was pretty painless too, and the simple user interface provided no issues to my Outlook-familiar wife or my 7-year-old daughter ! A nce feature of the Google service is the ability to set up friendly URL’s for the services (e.g. http://mail.domain.com or http://calendar.domain.com)

The only real potential gotcha I have so far encountered happened just now. Google mail has quite a good spam collector built in (on another Gmail account I have reached the point where I rarely bother to check it so confident I am that there will be any false positives), and in logging into the web interface I saw that it had already captured one spam item, which turned out to be quite an important email. Turning spam filtering off is an option, but I think it would be best to monitor the web account for a while until it ‘learns’ what is and isn’t spam to us.

Another success was setting up IMAP access to our old mail accounts (on the Domino server). Took a little bit of fiddling in Domino to make sure each mail database was set up for IMAP access properly, but once done I was able to drag and drop emails and folders to ensure all the mail I wanted to keep was now in Thunderbird. This was so successful that I can see Domino being decommissioned sooner rather than later. Or at the very least being left off by default and only being fired up if an old email needs to be searched for.

One previous facility that I have not yet reproduced, though, is synchronisation of my contacts and calendar between PDA and PC. I was using Laplink PDASync to synchronise Domino and my Palm Lifedrive, which worked very well. I have not yet been able to find a product that will sync the Palm with Thunderbird 2.0 although there does appear to be a product for Thunderbird 1.5 which will hopefully be updated soon. Exporting contacts to CSV seems to lose a lot of the nice information…and using vCards would require them being exported one by one ! The search continues on that one.

I came across a link to Google Apps the other day and it certainly intrigued me. Why ? Well, I have been running Lotus Domino as my personal mail server for some time now, primarily on the basis that I have many years experience with Domino, and it offers both a decent mail client (OK, Notes has it’s idiosyncrasies, but I am very familiar with it and can make it work the way I want) and the ability for me to check my mail online using Domino Web Access (DWA). This all happens in a VMWare-based virtual linux server (specifically Fedora Core 4) running Domino 7 and using fetchmail to pull four family members’ personal mail into separate mail databases. It works, and works well, but it has a downside. Basically, no matter where I am, if I want to access my personal or work emails then this virtual server has to be up and running. And since this does not sit in a server farm somewhere, I can’t guarantee it will be available.

So when I saw Google Apps I thought that there may be an opportunity to replicate the important aspects of my current setup within a more stable environment with higher availability. Here’s how I see it working:

• Register the ‘family’ domain name with Google Apps, giving mail, calendar, chat and website for free.
• Change my MX and various CNAME records for the domain to point to Google.
• Install Thunderbird as the new mail client, pulling emails from Google using POP3.

And that’s about it. The big issue right now is how to migrate everything from Notes to Thunderbird, but I will probably use IMAP to give access to old emails for a month or two and not bother copying everything across. Sometimes these exercises are a good means of having a tidy up !

I’m not totally convinced that POP3 is the way to go, but Google mail does have a setting that archives emails once they have been downloaded, and I think that will be the best solution. I will blog more about this, but initially I think it’s a good solution. I am certainly looking forward to the point in time when the Fedora VM is only fired up occasionally rather than running all the time. It’s a bit of a resource hog on what is, after all, a family PC.