Google Apps Transition Process

In the first half of 2011 we were notified by Google Apps that our school account was going to be transitioned into a new environment which would provide many additional apps and benefits for our users.
This was great news and something that we had been looking forward to.

It was not completely straight forward, particularly if you were a school with no full time IT admin staff or if you were a school who had been using Google Apps in a big way prior to the transition.

I decided to document our experience through a series of posts as we went through the transition.
Because Blogger is linear, the posts are in reverse order now, so this final post on the subject is to provide a table of contents in chronological order for anyone interested in benefitting from what we learnt.

1. Transitioning our Google Apps accounts
     Where to start

2. Impact of Conflicting Accounts
     What to do if you have used your school email address to sign up to other Google tools in the past

3. More servoices available to your school
    What new apps are available to your Administrator and your school

4. Transitioning User Accounts
    Move the whole school at once or select some pilot users to move first?

5.  Transition Process Complete
    Helping teachers and students access their apps (in our case Blogger) that have been moved from public Google accounts inside the school Google Apps domain.

Transition Process Complete

Several posts later, we finally get to enjoy the fruits of going through the painful transistion process with our Google Apps accounts.  We have apps like Blogger and Picasa inside our school Google Apps Domain and everyone is good to go.

Except.

There is one more step with the student individual blogs. Up until now the students from each class have been sharing a generic login to author their own blogs 

eg. room29@ptengland.school.nz

So the class teacher (who is Admin for all the individual student accounts) had to go into each blog from her Blogger Dashboard and choose Settings > Permissions >

then send an invite to the student using their personal Google Apps email address and invite them to be an author of their own blog.

This seems pretty straight forward:

The students receive an email in their gmail inbox, they click on the link which takes them to Blogger, they follow the instructions and, hey presto!  They can now sign in as themselves when they post to their own blog.

Well it should be that easy, but unfortunately the links to make that happen on two screens in the process are quite small and the text on those pages which catch the eye lead the student to start setting up a new blog.  So we made this next movie to remind the teachers and kids what to do.  They say it has been helpful....

Blog transition to Google Apps from KPE TV on Vimeo.

Now all this is behind us.

Our students sign in to their own Google Apps account.

They can acess their Docs, their mail, their Blog, their Sites, their Picasa account, their Maps - all through a single sign-on process.

The good news is that for the schools in our cluster who only joined up to Google Apps this year, they did not have to go through this process at all.  Their accounts are already in the new Google Apps environment.

Hope publishing this learning curve has been of use to others who are going through it.

Transitioning User Accounts

Having made the decision about which services to offer your school, the next step is to decide whether to bite on the bullet and transition everyone at once, or whether to test the waters with a few user accounts first.

"You can move everyone to the new infrastructure today, or you can try out the new account services with selected pilot users"

Pilot Group

 We went for the selected pilot users option and moved a few teachers, a handful of students and some random accounts set up for subject areas.  When you begin the transition Google offer you an email that they have created to send out to the people being moved to explain what was occuring. We accepted that offer - may as well see the reaction of the pilot users when they get that in their email inbox over the weekend! 


The result was a mixed bag as most of the users had conflicting accounts and they had to work through thay process by themselves.  The feedback from them clarified where the rest of the school would need support.  And that is what led me to this series of blog posts and movie tutorials.


The first concern to me was that a small group of users were unable to be moved at this time - and that included me!  It appeared that the one thing we had in common was that we have signed up to a lot of public Google services using our school domain email.  We are still "on hold" today, waiting for them to sort us out.  It seems that we can sort this ourselves though if we follow these four steps:

Step 1: Visit www.google.com/accounts and sign in with your personal Google Account
Step 2: Click "Change email" under "Personal Settings"
Step 3: Enter a different email address where you can receive mail, enter your password, and click "Save email address"
Step 4: Check your other email address and click the link in the verification message from Google to confirm your change

 With the knowledge we had gained so far we made this next video and showed it to the staff to give them an idea of what was to come...

More Services Available to your School

Behind the scenes, the adminstrator(s) of your Google Apps for Education account have received notification that your school account is going to be transitioned to the new infrastructure.  And they have the choice of doing it at their own pace, or leaving it to Google to action early this year. 

We decided to do it ourselves, and began the process by selecting which services of the 61 on offer we would make available to the school community.  We chose 3: Blogger, Picassa and Google Reader.  We will add more as teachers request them, but thought those were enough to get our heads around initially.

The briefing for account administrators includes:

"We're adding more services to your control panel, so be sure to tell us whether to turn each service on or off. After the transition, you'll be able to change available services for units within your organization.

Turning off a service prevents your users from signing in to the disabled service with the account assigned by your organization. They will still be able to sign in to those services using accounts that don't belong to your organization."

Why is this good news?  For one thing, once you sign in to your Google Apps account you now have these extra services available to access seamlessly without have to alter sharing permissions and you don't have to sign in again. For another, our students are all under legal age to own public Google accounts and so they can use these services without the teacher having to set up class accounts under their own name.

The video below is a screen capture and walk through of what it looked like when I explored this signed in as an administrator.

Impact of Conflicting Accounts

Having made the decision to transition our Google Apps accounts, we decided to do a little homework - including reading the manual! Or at least working through some of Google's help sheets and videos.

The most important thing for us was getting our head around the dreaded 'conflicting accounts" and how that would impact our users. We are not a big domain with only 500 accounts, but at least 400 of them have conflicting accounts and no-one wants to be the help desk for 400 people when they discover things are no longer how they should be.

There is a perfectly intelligible video from Google at the bottom of this post which gives their perspective on conflicting accounts, but let me give you mine.

Long before we moved to Google Apps for Education I had signed up for a number of Google Apps to use at school. My list included Docs, Sites, Blogger, Picassa, Reader, iGoogle etc. I used my @ptengland.school.nz email to sign up. It was so easy and once I had signed into one of them in a session the whole lot were available.

Then we moved to Google Apps in 2008 and now I had an account inside our Apps domain with exactly the same email address. And it all worked fine once you got it sorted that when you signed in using the green box you were inside Google Apps, and when you used the blue box you were in your public Google account. It would even let you have both accounts open in the same browser - as long as one was a public (blue) account and one was a Google Apps for Ed(green) account.

Warning: after the transition, I would no longer be able to use my school email address to access my public Google Account. Fair enough. And Google has a process to talk you through the first time you try to sign in. Sounds easy to anyone reading this blog, but there are lots of adults - and 350 children - who might finding the warning screens and 'helpful' emails incomprensible if not scary.

The next scenario is the children at the school. They all have a personal blog that is owned by the school (ie the Admin account) but they are able to Author their blog through a class sign in, set up by the school - and this is a public Google account. So they will find themselves confronting this too the first time they try to post to their blogs. And even more, they will no longer be able to have their Google Apps account open and their Blog open on the same browser. They are used to having different tabs open and flicking between them. This will create a conflict and no longer be allowed.

So we put some thought into how we could prepare for this before beginning the transition.

More about that next post...