How to integrate SharePoint 2007/2010 and Google Apps?
My (smaller) company has an existing Google Apps deployment used for E-Mail / Calendar etc.
I am looking into customizing SharePoint (most likely 2010). One of the best features is that new events are added to one Outlook calendar, emails can be sent automatically, etc. Naturally, this works best because of the Exchange box.
I know I can add my own OpenID login through the SharePoint OpenID provider and force my users to login.
My question is, can anyone recommend a better way to make sure events automatically go to users' calendars and emails in Google Apps?
This will allow us to deploy SharePoint without having to worry about migrating our email system to Exchange first (Google Apps is more cost effective for our needs, and I have to keep it.)
Thanks in advance for your help!
a source to share
My experience is that the Outlook integration is done through the client client, not the exchange server. Exchange server is unaware of SharePoint, at least not in the scenario I worked with it.
I'm not familiar with Google Apps, but if your users are already in Outlook, you're probably fine. The SharePoint calendar in Outlook appears as a calendar calendar (not your regular Exchange).
Email shouldn't be a problem as the SharePoint web server / web server sends emails through whatever SMTP you're talking about.
Hope it helps.
a source to share
Email won't be a problem - nothing is reported about alerts sent by SharePoint.
Calendars open in Outlook are actually not fully integrated with the Outlook / Exchange calendar. Outlook can simply open calendars from multiple locations to display side-by-side, so you can't get exactly what you're looking for, even with sharing.
For Google Calendar integration, you may find this post helpful: http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/mashpoint/archive/2009/01/26/how-to-render-sharepoint-list-data-from-a- google-calendar.aspx
a source to share
One piece of the puzzle is configuring outbound SharePoint email.
If you already have an smtp server, then no problem - but if not, you cannot send SharePoint directly to mail.gmail.com (or whatever your domain), since SharePoint cannot provide the authentication Google requires.
The solution is to use an IIS SMTP server as a relay between SharePoint and Gmail.
a source to share
We tried Shetab SharePoint Live Authentication solution which works with other OpenID provider like Google and Yahoo, much more customizable and interesting solution, best of preventing users from entering invalid emails, so our SharePoint warning not to send spam emails to unwanted uses. Installation is fully automated http://www.shetabtech.com/english/SharePointLiveAuth
a source to share