Re: Crazy talk: migrate to Google Apps?

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 9:00 PM, James Polley <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Erik de Castro Lopo <
> [email protected] <mle%[email protected]>> wrote:
>
>> James Polley wrote:
>>
>> > Disclaimer: I'm talking here in my role as a SLUG member, not in my role
>> as
>> > a committee member; I reserve the right to have a different opinion when
>> I
>> > put my VP hat on.
>>
>> I'm a slug member who doesn't work for google.
>>
>> However I have been running FP-Syd as a google group for nearly two
>> years.
>>
>> > The second-biggest downside is that I haven't (yet) been able to figure
>> out
>> > how arbitrary email addresses can be subscribed to the list: as far as I
>> can
>> > tell, only email addresses with an associated Google Account can
>> subscribe
>> > (the email address gets a confirmation email with a link; you have to
>> follow
>> > the link to confirm on a form that you want to subscribe, and you have
>> to
>> > log in to a Google Account in order to get to the form).[3]
>>
>> For some groups, you can also subscribe by sending mail to
>> [email protected], just like a regular mailing list.
>>
>> > What do you think? Is a migration to Google Apps crazy talk? Is it
>> something
>> > we should consider? What matters more to us - using FOSS as far as is
>> > possible, even if it severly strains our resources - or being pragmatic,
>> > paying a small amount of money to save us a lot of time?
>>
>> What you can 100% be absolutely assured of is more time dealing with
>> spam. The *only* way to keep spam of the FP-Syd list is to only allow
>> subscribers to post *and* to moderate all new subscribers (yes, people
>> subscribe to google groups just to spam them). FP-Syd only has about
>> 120 members, the SLUG mailing list would probably have about 10 times
>> more.
>>
>
> Groups for Apps has a slight advantage over plain Groups here in that it's
> possible to make the mail go through Postini's spam filtering first, which
> is significantly better than Groups' own spam filtering (ie, it actually
> blocks some spam). I've never personally used Postini though - I tried to
> set it up on a personal domain, but it required more cycles than I had to
> spare at the time....
>

I've had it pointed out that I didn't explain why any of this would cost
money, when gApps Standard Edition is still free.

In short:

 - Groups is only available for Premier and Education editions
 - SLUG doesn't qualify for Education edition, as we're not a registered
not-for-profit
 - therefore we'd have to pay $50/user/year for Premier Edition
 - Premier Edition includes Postini mail scanning in the price
 - We'd want at least 3 domain admin types with accounts, to help reduce the
bus-factor somewhat
 - but subscribers to the list can be anyone with a Google account, we
wouldn't have to pay for them
 - Likewise, most tasks can be delegated by anyone with a Google account,
the set of things that would require a domain admin are fairly small.


>
>> Personally I wish I had the time, knowledge and experience to pull FP-Syd
>> off google.
>>
>> Erik
>> --
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Erik de Castro Lopo
>> http://www.mega-nerd.com/
>> --
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>>
>
>

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