So a couple of things:

1. You call their customer service and I’d swear that within the first 20 seconds you hear about 5 different (automated) voices. It really gives you the feeling that you’re being shunted around.

2. I had a lot of connection problems yesterday (originally wrote this a month or so ago). I waited forever to get into a customer chat and failed, so I sent an email. Got an email response this morning telling me to call because they couldn’t solve the problem via email. About 10 minutes later I got an automated phone call to tell me that known problems in my area had been resolved. Oh and about 15 seconds after I sent the support email I got a call from someone verifying that my original install had gone well and all was fine. They were a bit unsure what to say when I told them I was having problems, which plainly didn’t fit with the script.

3. At the second try I did get the service hooked up at the new place, but the TV signal has been bad (no HD at all). The service guys told me that the line to my house would need replacing and it would be done on Monday. Nothing better by Friday so I call and there’s no record of that being scheduled or needed, so now a tech has to come to my house, probably to confirm the same issue that another tech already identified.

user_entry = service.RetrieveUser(username)
print "user entry: " + user_entry.name.family_name

In essence this means that if you get all the features that you want with a Google site and the other integrated services (email, calendar, docs, etc), then you can use Google for all your hosting needs. Obviously if you want Wordpress or some custom component, it’s not going to meet your needs, but it will work for a lot of people, and it’s free (and obviously very reliable). It’s also got excellent documentation, ease of use and in the long-term a web site design contractor doesn’t have to worry so much about those endless requests for support or upgrades.

I’ve just more or less finished setting a friend’s business up like this and they couldn’t be happier. It’s a site for a rehabilitation service for pets.

This weekend I’m in charge of moving 300,000+ users from our internal email system to Google Apps for Education. Fundamentally, I suppose, I’m in charge of the whole project. I’m excited about it because of the fantastic expansion of services it offers our students, faculty and staff. At the same time, it’s another high profile project, so the risks are magnified should something go wrong. Go Live is tomorrow morning first thing.

We’re not only creating the accounts, but have to get single sign-on (via SAML) right, account synchronization, and we are also migrating all the students’ old email via IMAP from the old system. That’s what is taking the big chunk of time right now. It’s sufficiently big enough that I’m getting some server errors on our migration history page, so although I feel pretty confident that things are going okay, I don’t actually know for sure.