July 11, 2008

I recently added google apps to my website, which basically lets me use the gmail interface for my email from gregisraelsen.com.  Very sweet.  Here are the steps:

Go to the Google Apps homepage and sign up (direct link to the free signup page).

Select “I want to use an existing domain name”
Choose “Administrator: I own or control this domain”
Enter your domain name in the box (example: www.gregisraelsen.com)

Fill in the information on the signup page

Select a username (choose carefully – this will be the primary username for the domain name) and password
Accept the terms and conditions

When you arrive at the Dashboard, you will need to activate the services that you want to use.
You can choose to enable (or disable) google start page, chat, docs, email, calendar, sites

When you first set up google apps on your site, you will need to verify that you own the domain, which you do by creating a simple html file for which google will give you the name and contents.

If you want to make a custom subdomain for your apps (eg calendar.gregisraelsen.com, docs.gregisraelsen.com, etc.), then you need to add a subdomain to your site (using cpanel just click on subdomains, then create whatever you want it to be).
I’ll do the walkthrough for email.
From your google apps dashboard, click on email.
On the email settings page, under the general tab, click on “Change URL”.
Select “custom” url, and enter subdomain you just created (ex. mail.gregisraelsen.com)
If you don’t have access to edit CNAME records with your webhost (I, for example, do not), then send an email to your host’s support and ask them to enter a CNAME entry for you, using the settings on the page.
Here’s the text of the email I sent:

Could you please add the following CNAME setting to the subdomain mail.gregisraelsen.com:

1. Find the CNAME settings and enter the following as the CNAME value or alias:mail
2. Set the CNAME destination to the following address:ghs.google.com

Thanks!

Greg Israelsen

After your CNAME entries are in, then you are good to go!

Now you can enjoy using google apps from your very own site!

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