Sam's World Of No

For some months, a note has existed on my backpack to blog about moving to Google Apps - to provide what I needed when I moved; a definitive guide. Unfortunately, there have been one or two snags along the way, and I moved my email, my calendar and my google talk account, but with limited success. Here’s some of the tips I picked up along the way, and some of the frustrations for which I await a fix.

Email

My first problem was email. I was moving to Google Apps from a normal Gmail account. The migration was simple - I set up IMAP on the Gmail account and added it as a secondary account on the Google Apps account. This works just fine, although it is slow - very slow. It took nearly a week for all 239 mb of my email to be transferred over. So here’s a top tip - decide you’re going to move, set a date, and some time before that, lay the groundwork by starting this process.

Note: At work, we have used the Google migration tools which are available with more non-free versions. This process was significantly quicker at migrating our current IMAP mailboxes over.

I then switched my old Gmail account to bounce to my new Apps account, and all email bounces through happily while I gradually update the places where that address is stored. This also has the added advantage of filtering some spam out, which is nice, but not really a great concern as Google’s spam filtering is by far the best.

So it’s all going well; my Google toolbar is signed into the Apps account, and I hit the red mail button. Oh dear - it’s asking me to register the email address I’ve just created on Apps as a Google identity for a Gmail account - an account that could never receive email. Fair enough, I thought, and closed the window.

A couple of days later, I installed the Google notifier on my Mac - this worked fine with email being on Apps. The Mac dashboard widget, however, did not. I completed my account details and it complained the account didn’t exist. I clicked through to Google to find that it had set up a new Gmail account for the Apps email address, without even asking. And to add insult to injury, the new account was Gmail 2.0, which I still haven’t had rolled out on any of my Google accounts, at work, at home, anywhere. Wasn’t impressed.

So to summarise; Notifier on Mac works with Apps, Toolbar on Firefox Windows goes mad. And so does the dashboard widget. Clearly, Google is missing a link in some of its products which would allow them to identify and differentiate between Apps and non-Apps services.

Calendar

My migration from normal Google Calendar to Apps Calendar was simple enough - I shared the old calendars with the new account, and will use them for archive purposes. Again, Mac notifier works just fine, again the Firefox Google toolbar failed miserably. Click the calendar icon, and a page opens up:

Oops. A calendar already exists for xxx@xxx.com

(Email address censored by me)

Oops indeed. But don’t worry, Google will bounce you to the right page:

Go to your null calendar

New invitations sent to xxx@xxx.com will be added to this calendar. If you have an account at null, you can sign in at:

http://calendar.google.com/hosted/null

Maybe not. Apparently my null calendar is where it’s at - if I have an account at null, I can access it. Clicking that link (just for amusement, obviously it wasn’t going to work) brings up an error page - an error page that gives a 200 status code, no less. Win.

So it seems that in this instance, Google tried to help me out when I clicked into a calendar that shouldn’t exist, but the good intentions were let down by some buggy code. This is better than mail, which doesn’t realise that an Apps account exists for the domain, but still not perfect.

Reader

Google Apps doesn’t include Reader, so I ended up setting up a normal Google account with my main address on my new Apps domain. Perhaps this is what broke the calendar and mail. Migrating the subscriptions was easy - simply export as OPML on the old account, and import on the new. Done.

IM - GTalk and MSN

I didn’t bother migrating contacts with talk - I just added them again, both in Google talk itself and MSN (having set up my new main address as a M$ Passport). I like this exercise - it allows me to ditch contacts I never speak to. It also provides an interesting acid test - will people add me again? Fortunately, all did. IM was therefore back up and running straight away.

Imified/Twitter - Again, my Imified setup didn’t merit migration. I added the contact in MSN and had it going in a few minutes or so. I also added both Twitter and Imified to my new Apps GTalk account. No love. Not a jot - in fact, this opened up a world of pain.

I tackled the problem from the Twitter angle - basically, for the xmpp/jabber stuff to work with non-google talk services, you have to add some SRV records to your domain, and there’s a few very useful pages out there on sorting this out. To summarise them, at the moment my understanding is that the full SRV breakdown is as follows:

_xmpp-server._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

_xmpp-client._tcp.yourDomainName.com IN SRV 5 0 5222 talk.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.yourDomainName.com IN SRV 20 0 5222 talk1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.yourDomainName.com IN SRV 20 0 5222 talk2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.yourDomainName.com IN SRV 20 0 5222 talk3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-client._tcp.yourDomainName.com IN SRV 20 0 5222 talk4.l.google.com.

_jabber._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.yourDomainName.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

But still, it doesn’t work. Twitter has experienced a lot of technical issues recently, and it’s easy to use a broad brush and suggest this is their fault. But Imified doesn’t work either, and all the debugging suggestions are fruitless.

So that’s it! I can’t get federated services for GTalk to work, and Google seems to be unable to lookup the names of its own Apps domains, meaning you are bounced to strange error pages and Gmail accounts that will never receive mail! But generally, it’s a pretty easy process and for the sake of consolidation, it’s worth it.

Now I just have to get openID working…