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Google Apps for Education

Fri, 2007-05-04 16:37 — kmbaur

We, Harding University, have just decided to move to Google Apps for Education for our email and calendar solutions. We are about to start blazing the trail unless there are some of you who have pursued writing SAML SSO connectors via Google's API services. They are pretty comprehensive (especially the account provisioning API) and I'm looking forward to the relationship we have already begun with our Google representatives.

So has anyone done anything with Google Apps and Luminis?

Thanks,

--Mike Baur
Manager Application Development
Harding University
(501) 279-4007

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Wed, 2007-05-09 10:46 — Brian Ferris

RE: Google Apps for Education

Hi!

We made this same decision back in January. We went live about a month ago using SAML SSO. Let me know if you have any questions.

Wed, 2007-05-09 15:22 — gpacker

RE: Google Apps for Education

Hi Brian,

I would be interested in how you have your Google Apps setup. Few questions that come to mind:

1. How do you handle password sync?
2. How do you import users?
3. Did you set this up as an email channel or a link the user needs to click on?

Thanks.

Wed, 2007-05-09 16:02 — kp

RE: Google Apps for Education

Hi Glenn,

I work with Brian at Hofstra. To answer your questions:

1. We do not sync passwords with Google (at least not at the moment and probably not in the any near future). Basically we didn't want Google having end user passwords, not to mention that since we use Novell, all passwords are encrypted and we don't have a way to pull them out to sync with Google. By default we make their password a unique string known only to the student so if they want to enable pop (which is off by default) they can do so and they can then change their google password separately. We provide documentation to the end user on how to do so

2. We have imported uses via 2 methods - the first was via the bulk import from the Google admin (BLEH!). This was the first route we went with the beginning and had some horrible problems like the import stopping for unknown reasons and needing to be restarted. Since then we have gone with using the api to import users. One thing to note, the api we are using is 1.0 and google has sent notices stating that while they are still supporting the 1.0 api however all users must upgrade to 2.0 and any new customers must use the 2.0 api. Basically the program we wrote reads in a text file, parses it and feeds it to the google api which then runs. Often times we have errors from google like:

Java Error: com.google.gdata.util.ServiceException: Bad Gateway

So we built in a routine just to loop the account again and it works fine the second time around. The api is faster than the bulk import.

3. We set this up as a link the user needs to click. If you end up getting this working as an e-mail channel we would definitely be interested.

-Kevin

Wed, 2007-05-09 17:13 — Brian Ferris

RE: Google Apps for Education

Yep, with the exception of POP (which Kevin mentions above) once you turn on SSO for Google, password synchronization isn't necessary because you're not authenticating with passwords(the way you would with say, CPIP). You're not providing credentials, you're saying to Google, yes, this person is logged in AND they should have access to this user account. Passwords don't apply.

Fri, 2007-05-11 10:03 — gpacker

RE: Google Apps for Education

Thanks for the good information. As of right now we don't plan on fully moving students over until next year or so. We are still testing and at some point I would like to prove that we can do SSO from our portal. A channel would be nice, even if it only displayed unread emails. The fact that we don't have to worry about passwords is a major plus. That was the first thought running through my head.

Thu, 2007-05-31 00:44 — jkstilwell

RE: Google Apps for Education

It looks like you used a servlet to perform the SAML authentication. Is that correct? If so, do you think it would be a more direct approach to serve it up from a separate app server (i.e. tomcat) or use the same one that luminis is running on?

Thu, 2007-05-31 00:43 — jkstilwell

RE: Google Apps for Education

what mechanisms are you using to ensure that a user is authenticated through luminis when handling the SAML request from google? Thanks.

Sat, 2008-06-14 15:28 — hmalla

Greetings

Dear Kevin,
I read ur interrogation which stimulate me to dig into GOOGLE Apps for education.
I'm functional consultant who learned luminis from the functional angle.
I'm interested to know more about this application in order to implement it into unversities where I have projects...
I'll be very thanklful if u provide me by some guidelines and references... to implement it...
Regards,
Malli

Thu, 2008-05-29 11:08 — sabromow

Google Apps integration

Hi,
We are looking to start a pilot. If you can share any information with how you integrated Luminis with Google Apps it would be very helpful. We are currently running 3.3.3.

Thanks
Sam Abromowitz
Northeastern University

Thu, 2007-12-13 17:39 — caballosweb

haring information and ideas

haring information and ideas is vital to learning. So imagine how valuable it would be if your entire campus community shared a set of powerful, easy-to-use and integrated communication and collaboration services. With Google Apps for Education, you can offer all of your students innovative email, instant messaging, and calendaring, all for free.* You can select any combination of our available services (see below), and customize them with your school’s logo, color scheme and content. You can manage your users through an easy web-based console or use our available APIs to integrate the services into your existing systems — and it’s all hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.
*Schools accepted by Google during the Google Apps for Your Domain beta period are eligible for free service for their approved beta users even beyond the end of the beta period, as described in the Terms of Service.*

The apps they’re starting off with are Gmail, Google Talk and Google Calendar. They’ve also got an administration module for managing your accounts. Interestingly, the non-education version also includes Google Pages. Kinda curious as to why that one was left off.

There’s no indication of what the pricing might eventually be, but they do state that the people who get in during beta are grandfathered in and won’t be charged when it moves to 1.0, so if you’re school might even be remotely interested in it, sign up now. Free email, calendaring and of course, the always controversial chat. Can’t go wrong with that!

_______________________
Submited by : Caballos

Mon, 2008-04-28 16:50 — julied

usernames

Our student government has requested that their email be first.mi.lastname@cameron.edu (e.g. john.a.smith@cameron.edu). Then if someone already has that, they add a number. Do you create your own usernames with google and how do you deal with duplicates? Is that written into the script you create the csv file with or does google handle this? How do you deal with alumni so that after awhile your usernames can look like john.a.smith452@cameron.edu? Is that an issue or do students just accept that they're number 452? Also, how do you get the information to the student that they are number 452 instead of just john.a.smith?

Sorry for all the questions. Just looking for some info on if google apps would be a good way to go with this request from student government. Thanks!