Google Apps for Education

Overview

Google Apps for Education was implemented for Crosfields School to provide pupils in Years 5-8 with school email addresses for the first time, and to provide centrally controlled access to cloud services such as Google Docs and Google Sites for both pupils and staff. Google Apps Directory Sync was implemented to assist with account provisioning and to enable passwords to be synchronised with the school’s Active Directory infrastructure.

Need

As both staff and pupil use of IT had grown, it had become apparent that there was a growing desire for email communication between staff and pupils, in particular to allow prep work to be set by teachers, and completed prep submitted by pupils. Use of pupils’ personal email addresses was undesirable both for e-safety reasons, and because not all pupils would yet have  personal email account. The school therefore needed to provide pupils with a robust email system that could be accessed from home. For cost reasons, adding pupils to the on-premises Exchange mail server used by staff was ruled out at an early stage, so two free cloud services were evaluated: Google Apps for Eduction, and Microsoft Live@Edu.

Considerations

• Pupil email would need to be monitored automatically for possible abuse (either by pupils or third parties), with the ability for staff to access pupil-assigned school accounts at will.
• Any instant messaging platform provided with the cloud email service would need to be controllable and/or monitored by the school for possible abuse as above.
• Ability to integrate cloud data with the Intranet portal was desirable.
• Since the school used Microsoft Office throughout, the ability to open & save documents to the cloud using Microsoft Office was strongly desirable.
• Additional functionality, in particular web collaboration, was desirable to help pilot VLE-like functionality in the school before committing to a full VLE product purchase.
• To ensure a low administrative burden on IT support, it was essential that accounts could be provisioned based on existing data in the on-premises Active Directory.

Solution

• Google Apps for Education was selected, for several key reasons:
• All functionality for Google Apps is provided free of charge. Live@Edu would incur a small per-year software licensing cost, along with significant server resources to run the Identity Lifecycle Manager software to synchronise cloud accounts with Active Directory.
• During the pilot phase, Google Sites was considered by staff to be easier to set up and maintain by non-IT users.
• Google Apps provided the ability to completely disable the use of the IM system (Google Chat), even when the account is accessed from home. Live@Edu does not provide the ability to disable use of the Windows Live Messenger client.
• A shared address space scenario was configured in both Gmail and the on-premises Exchange server to allow both staff and pupil email addresses to use the @crosfields.com domain.
• Google Apps Directory Sync was set up on an existing server to provision and synchronise users from the school’s Active Directory.
• Unread email details were integrated into the pupil Intranet portal via 2-legged OAuth using the GData .NET Client Library.
• A unified ‘Home Access’ site was launched to give staff and pupils a single web address from which to access both on-premises and clouds services from home.