Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Moving to Google Apps

I've been a user of GMail since the very beginning. I've been using Google Reader for a while now. I've always liked the google products for my personal needs. A recent post on BoS about using Google Apps for Email got me to look into using Google Apps for my uISV. I have 3 domains set up so I did a test with my least used domain. I configured the email correctly and everything worked like a charm. I had to do a little searching on how to update my MX records, but it was easy once I found how to do it. After using it for a little bit, I bit the bullet and switched over everything.

I'd like to say it went without a snag, but that is not the case. In Web Work Schedules, there are several places where email notifications are sent out, like when a schedule changes, or when a user sends feedback to me. Luckily I tested this after making the changes and found out that it was broken. It looked like a 5 minute fix to update the SMTP host, username, password, etc.

Things always take longer than anticipated. I was missing a setting in java mail for STARTTLS property that was a problem. Add that and retest. Oops. I was creating the mail session to soon, fix that retest. Everything should be working. Its working locally, so push it to the server. Damn, its not working. I'm checking the configuration files that I modified. I love typos, how about you. I was missing one little 's' in the username and for some reason, the authentication was failing :) So after 1 1/2 hours everything was back up and running.

One cool thing is that now that I'm splitting time between my desktop and my laptop, I'm using google docs more and I'm finding it pretty useful. The files I need are always available. I'm not 100% sold on everything, but so far I'm liking the experience.

2 comments:

jonchase said...

Hey Chris - so does WWS actually use Google's SMTP server to send out its emails? I wasn't aware this could be done.

If that's the case, I'll have to update SA's config to point to the Google servers (I use Google Apps too).

Chris said...

Yes it does. That is what caused all the fun :) A quick google showed what I was doing wrong with the java mail API, and then a few other stupid things, but in the end yes it is using Googles SMTP server so send the emails out. It works great now!