Geeking At School

It's been a while since I last posted...figured I owed it to people to give them an update of what's been going on. First, archiving Google Apps email with Lightspeed TTC. This is by far the most popular subject that people who visit my site are searching for (according to Google Analytics). Of course, 'most popular' means all of three or so people who are interested in the subject. But there is enough interest out there that I'd better keep talking about it. After moving to Google Apps for Education, our initial goal was to use Postini for archiving email for the first year to make life easy for us, and then look into possibly moving to our own email archiving system in-house, which would be Lightspeed TTC email archiving. However, while this is a great idea (and still one we may consider) our plans and hopes were dampened by us actually having to USE Lightspeed's email archiving system to retrieve emails. Now, chances are we didn't do this right. And the l...

Checking the analytics for my blog, it appears that archiving Google Apps email with Lightspeed's "Message Journaling" feature is by far the most popular (which isn't saying much, as my blog does not get very much traffic anyway). As an update to this possibility--I'll share a little chat I had with Lightspeed's tech support the other day. We had a problem with our Groupwise email not being archived at all (don't ask, long story), and, as part of the process to get it back up and running, I called Lightspeed's tech support. During the course of our conversation I asked about the possibility of Google Apps email being supported by Lightspeed anytime soon...the customer support representative went on to tell me that they have been getting requests for that, and that it's something they probably would be looking into in the future, although he was pretty vague about it. I mentioned to him about the idea of the 'Incoming' and 'Outgoing'...

This was requested quite a while ago--sorry I haven't been able to share it until now. These are the theoretical steps one would go through to archive Google Apps for Education email with Lightspeed Systems' TTC . I do not take any credit for these instructions/steps--they have been adapted from an email I got from a guy working at a school district in the Midwest. He did have the system working, although I have not had a chance to test it out myself. We will probably look into this a little more seriously after this year is up as our current projects include moving to Windows 2008 Server from Novell, changing to Google Apps email from Groupwise, as well as making many other changes, so email archiving is not a huge priority right now. We're just biting the bullet and paying Postini for email archiving to start off with. Disclaimer: as the title of this blog post says, these are theoretical, as I actually haven't had a chance to test it out yet. So don't blame me i...

Meant to post this last Monday but life got real busy real quick. So...got a response from the person I emailed earlier about archiving Google Apps for Education email using Lightspeed's TTC server. The verdict? He was able to implement it...but it took quite a bit of doing. I'll update this later when I can make a little more sense of what he said. It was a tad confusing and involved, but was doable, which is pretty much awesome. The basic setup involves redirecting Google Apps MX records to your TTC server, which then forwards the mail to a computer on your network (he suggested hmail) and then point that back out to Google to handle the email. But this way, it gets the mail in your network where it can be archived. More on that later when I have some time to look into it more.

One of the biggest things I'd like to change for our school district is our email system. We're currently using Novell Groupwise--which isn't a bad system overall, it's just clunky and not so user-friendly and is WAY overloaded with features that we'll never use. I'm a Google guy...I've used many different webmail clients, and, out of all of them, Gmail is by far the best--especially when integrated with Google Calendar and Google Docs. Schools can get Google Apps for Education, which includes email, calendar, and docs for free. FREE is very appealing for school districts. So why have we not implemented this yet? Well...it boils down to a little problem called email archiving. We're required by law to archive emails for use as forensic evidence. Google offers a service called Postini to archive Google mail (which used to be on its own, but I believe Google bought them out) but costs a LOT of money...money that we do not have. We implement a system called...