Google Apps for Education - Dual Email Delivery with Exchange 2007

Coming off the Midwest Google Apps Summit, I had an impromptu meeting with my tech team this morning to give them the low down on the conference and what I had learned and what was likely to come next.

After it was clear that I was completely enamored with GAFE, they too were ready to give it shot.  It didn't take much convincing as we have a great team open to new ideas.  So this afternoon, we signed up for our Google Apps Edu account to begin our internal ITS pilot.

We registered our main domain name and proceeded through the custom wizard to setup dual delivery with our Microsoft Exchange environment.  It was quite simple and a really a pleasant surprise to go through the wizard.

We verified domain ownership through creating a simple TXT record in our external DNS.  It took about 5 minutes for it to verify once the record was created.  Then the wizard walked us through the dual delivery process for a "legacy" system.  We happen to be using Exchange 2007.

At this point we had a choice.  We could either create a "test" temporary domain, i.e. @gtest.domain.org or we could utilize a Google supplied test domain.  Rather than create a test domain and create further DNS entries and MX records we opted just to utilize the Google supplied test domain that looks like our_domain.com.test-google-a.com.

Once this was in place we sent a few test emails to user@our_domain.com.test-google-a.com to verify delivery was working to the few ITS accounts we had setup for ourselves.  Then we opened up the Exchange Management Console created External SMTP Contact accounts that were for our temporary test email accounts (user@our_domain.com.test-google-a.com) then we setup our accounts in Exchange to forward all mail to that new contact and also checked the box to deliver mail to the forwarding address and the exchange mailbox.

Then we simply sent a few test messages from externally and internally to test.  BOOM! Dual delivery up and running. Total time spent 20 minutes.

Email is now being delivered to both Exchange and Google Apps Mail for our ITS staff.  We also played around with the Google Apps for Outlook Migration plug-in to move e-mail out of our current Outlook into Apps Mail.

It should be noted that this is just one of the supported methods for dual delivery.  Since we are just in the very early testing phases I didn't want to change any MX records for mail.  That is why we choose this option.  The other option involves routing all mail to Google first.  Both methods are explained in more detail here on the Google Apps support site.

Tomorrow will configure more of the dashboard.