How to Integrate SharePoint 2007/2010 and Google Apps?

Question

Hello All,

My (smaller) company has an existing Google Apps Deployment, used for E-Mail / Calendar, etc.

I'm looking into a SharePoint setup (2010 most likely). One of the best features is that new events are added to one's Outlook Calendar, e-mails can be sent automatically, etc. Naturally, this works best out-of-the-box with Exchange.

I know I can add my own OpenID login system via an OpenID provider for SharePoint and get my users into the system.

My question is, can anyone recommend the best way to go about making sure that events automatically find their way into users' calendars and e-mails on the Google Apps system?

This would enable us to deploy SharePoint without worrying about migrating our e-mail system to Exchange first (Google Apps is more cost-effective for our needs and I'm required to keep it.)

Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

My experience has been that the Outlook integration is via the user's client not the exchange server. The exchange server isn't aware of SharePoint, at least in the scenario's I've been working with it.

I'm not familiar with Google Apps, but if your users are already in Outlook then you are probably OK. The SharePoint calendar in Outlook shows up as another calendar (not your normal Exchange related) calendar anyhow.

Email shouldn't be an issue since the SharePoint front end/web server sends the emails through whatever SMTP you tell it to.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

Email won't be a problem - there's nothing exchange-specific about the alerts sent by SharePoint.

Calendars opened in outlook are not actually fully integrated with the outlook/exchange calendar. Outlook is simply able to open calendars from multiple locations for side by side display, so you may not get exactly what you are looking for even with exchange.

For google calendar integration you may find this post useful: http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/mashpoint/archive/2009/01/26/how-to-render-sharepoint-list-data-from-a-google-calendar.aspx

Answer 3

One part of this puzzle is how to setup SharePoint outgoing email.

If you already have a smtp server then no problem - but if not you can't get SharePoint to send directly to mail.gmail.com (or whatever your domain is) as SharePoint can't supply the authentication that google demands.

The solution is to use IIS SMTP server as a relay between SharePoint and Gmail.

http://fmuntean.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/how-to-configure-iis-smtp-server-to-forward-emails-using-a-gmail-account/

Answer 4

Hi

We have tried Shetab SharePoint Live Authentication solution that work with other OpenID provider such as Google and yahoo too, much more customizable and interesting solution, the best of it that prevent users to enter invalid e-mails so our SharePoint alert does not send spam mails to unwanted uses. Installation are all automated http://www.shetabtech.com/english/SharePointLiveAuth