Hello Hive13 members!
I am pleased to announce that after working with Google they have decided to grant us Educational Access for our Google Groups account! This is great news for us because in the past we were using the Standard version and we were starting to reach our limits to what we could do with that. Unfortunately we could not afford to pay on a per account basis to upgrade to a higher version. Google has granted us the Educational version for free based on our 501(c)(3) status!
For a breakdown of differences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Apps
Basically for us what we will start working on is the single-sign on and ldap integration capabilities. This will allow all the services (including internal fileservers) to be managed via the google accounts system. Disabling a hive13.org account will disable it across the domain and creating one will give access automatically to all of our resources.
They also have other APIs for account provisioning, conferences and our own youtube like video service. I haven’t personally dug into how all of these new features work yet and it will probably take time for me to ramp up on all the new features. I am also very curious as to what the educational apps are and if they can help us with our events and classes.
I’ll post more info as we learn more about what we can do. Anybody interested in collaborating on integration can contact me and I’ll organize some projects.
Regards,
Craig