Walk through of Gmail for your domain

My wife is starting a new business and as her geek husband, it is my job to set up the company on email and calendaring. Since it is just a start up, there is no way I want to outfit the company with Microsoft Office or use Microsoft Outlook Express. I want the email to come to and be sent from her domain, kidsearlyed.com, so most hosted solutions were out of the question. So I decided to apply for the beta of Gmail for your domain. I had to answer some qualifying questions and it only took about 12 hours to receive my invite. Here is a step by step walk through of setting it up:

1. I received my email saying I had been invited to participate to my regular Google account.

2. After clicking on the link, I had to login using my regular Gmail account login.

3. After logging in, I was taken to an administrative Dashboard for the domain I wanted to use. You can see on the left of the screen shot that my plan includes 25 free email accounts. I have yet to find a way to get more but I was looking purely out of curiosity. I only need about 5 right now.

The first notice it to update my MX records for domain to point the mail to Google.

4. Clicking on “Change MX Records” took me to a page describing how to change my MX records in GoDaddy’s system. I had never previously specified which registrar I used for the domain so they must have automated this through a whois. Or, GoDaddy just happened to be the first option in the drop down. They had many others available but I didn’t grab a list. The instructions were comprehensive and pretty fool proof.

5. After making the change in GoDaddy’s system, I had to wait for the new MX records to propagate. In the meantime, I decided to explore the other options. Over on the left, I clicked on the link, “Domain Settings.” Here I was able to set a text name for the company and contact information for the admin contact. The text name is used on the private login page.

After saving the Organization Name and Support Contact, I the screen was refreshed with the new options of changing the color of the sign in box on the sign in page, uploading a new logo to appear in the upper left of Gmail and Google Calendar, and the option to enable Google Talk and catch all email addresses.

The next step was to add some users. There are two links in the left navigation, Users and Create User. The Create User link takes you to a very simple form. Add the First Name, Last Name and Email Address and your done. You can also use a random password generated for you or set your own.

Once a user is added, Sign In instructions are displayed. These can be printed or emailed.

Clicking on the Users link on the left displays a list of all created users including their last login date. Nothing special here.

Hosted Gmail also provides the option to set up an email list. Type in an alias in the first box under choose a name and then select email addresses in the next box. You need to search for each recipient that you want to add.

In my setup, I created staff@ and added all the users to that list.

Under Advanced Tools, you can do a bulk upload of users. Simply type them out in a spreadsheet, save them as a CSV and upload.

That’s basically all there was to it. Once the MX records were setup, I logged in as one of the users I created. Notice my new Gmail logo in the upper left. Each user is presented with the Terms of Service upon logging in.

These next screens should look familiar to any one that has a Gmail account. These are the same screens that each new regular Gmail user is shown.

Even the two default email messages.

Screen shot of hosted Google Calendar. No real difference here. (Again, notice my custom logo shows up in the Calendar.

All in all, this was super easy to set up. I setup a redirect from email.kidsearlyed.com to the login page for Host Gmail so it would be easier for users to get to. Hope this was helpful.

Technorati : Email, Gmail, Google