Google Apps for small biz

August 24, 2012 8:45 AM

I'm helping someone setup google apps for a small biz. Already signed up for google apps and bought the domain name through google (enom.com). Need help building a document repo out of GDocs and redirecting the main domain (example.com and www.example.com) to a website hosted on an outside hosting server.

1. How to use docs(drive) as a shared document repository. Right now settings are set as visible to anyone in the organization. But unless they get the link (or shared explicitly with them) they won't see the docs in their account. What I would want to any document from anyone to show up in everyone elses account.

2. I would like to host the main web site for the biz with another outside hosting company. This is a screenshot of the enom dashboard. How do I point example.com (and www.example.com) to a outside hosting server and still not mess up rest of the google apps, like mail.example.com, docs.example.com, calendar.example.com and all the email accounts (@example.com)?
Thanks.

posted by WizKid to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Can't help you with point 1, as I have no experience with google docs.

Point 2 is all about DNS.
The succinct version is that you need to point the DNS records for example.com and www.example.com to your hosting provider, and point everything else to google.

Create the following DNS records, replacing example.com with your domain name, and the ip address with the correct data for the external web host:

example.com IN A 10.0.0.1
www IN CNAME example.com.

Now, for all the google hosted content, a quick google search seems to indicate you need CNAME records for ghs.google.com. Like so:

mail.example.com IN CNAME ghs.google.com.
docs.example.com. IN CNAME ghs.google.com.
calendar.example.com. IN CNAME ghs.google.com.
anythingelse.example.com. IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

(I've never actually used google apps for domains, so please set whatever values they recommend. I referred to this for the information above: http://support.google.com/sites/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99448 )

Email routing is governed by MX Records. So you'll need those too:

example.com. IN MX 1 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
example.com. IN MX 5 5 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM


(reference: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=140034
http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=174125)


Hopefully this helps.
posted by namewithoutwords at 11:00 AM on August 24, 2012

#1. There's an [e-mail] group in all domains that's automatically updated - http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66338. A collection shared with all should work. Other than that, it's probably a question of policy. Not certain that there's a technical solution to make everything immediately visible.
posted by idb at 11:23 AM on August 24, 2012

Thanks for the replies so far.

@namewithoutwords - So according to the screenshot I should change the last row of 'Host Records' to say
[www]-[example.com]-[CNAME (Alias)]
and add a new row saying
[example.com]-[hosting provider DNS IP]-[A (Address)]

Is this the right syntax?

In the area 'DNS Information' I only have two options, default or custom. In custom I can enter the hosting provider DNS IPs. That's how I normally do, since after this initial redirection I handle everything at the hosting provider, including email.
But in this case I feel that if I change the the DNS Info it would just point everything to the Hosting provider and loose the GApps functionality.
posted by WizKid at 12:12 PM on August 24, 2012

The www *can* be mapped to a Google Site (which is actually a pretty nice feature), but yes, I think you're right.
posted by idb at 1:56 PM on August 24, 2012