Going Google - Reconfiguring Staff Computers

The next step in going Google is a big one! We have outlined a plan to collect all staff computers and reconfigure them for our summer conversion to Google Apps for Education. This will involve about 350 teacher laptops. Let the fun begin.

There are a few key items that represent significant change:

• There will be no email client configured. All staff will complete the school year using Outlook Web Access only. Entourage and Outlook will be blank.
• We have added Google Chrome as an additional browser option. Google Chrome is not the default browser. We stayed with Firefox as the default browser. I expect that many users will try Google Chrome and like it. I really like Chrome. I also expect it to become our default browser on the next refresh. 
• We have installed the Google Notifier on our Macs. Google Notifier is a handy utility that sits in the Mac OS X menu bar and notifies users of new email messages and calendar appointments. It also helps us make NASDschools Gmail the default "Mailto" client in Firefox.

There are a number of other updates but these are the ones significant to our migration to Google Apps for Education.