Setting up the DNS of your Google Apps Domain Name

This post is for those who want to use a domain name bought before the google apps account creation. Indeed, if you buy a domain name with the google apps interface, everything will be working fine. The trick is to manually set up the correct DNS configuration. So either you use the DNS service provided by your registrar (you lucky guy !) or you can use a free DNS service such as xname.org. Here is the correct DNS stuff you need to add:

• A Records
  

@ A 72.14.207.121
@ A 64.233.179.121
@ A 66.249.81.121

• CNAME records (don't forget the trailing dot at the end)
  

www      CNAME   ghs.google.com.
calendar CNAME   ghs.google.com.
start     CNAME   ghs.google.com.
mail     CNAME   ghs.google.com.
docs     CNAME   ghs.google.com.
sites     CNAME   ghs.google.com.

• MX records (don't forget the trailing dot at the end)

MX 10 aspmx.l.google.com.
MX 20 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
MX 30 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
MX 40 aspmx2.googlemail.com.
MX 40 aspmx3.googlemail.com.
MX 40 aspmx4.googlemail.com.
MX 40 aspmx5.googlemail.com.

If you have a blog on blogger, e.g., yourblog.blogspot.com, you can also add a blog subdomain, just add this line in your CNAME records (of course, you also need to tell blogger about this by digging into the configuration interface) :

blog      CNAME   ghs.google.com.

Hope that helps !

Google Sites aka Google Wikis are Finally Out !

Google did acquired Jotspot long time ago for their wiki platform. Well, it took 16 months to relaunch it but it's finally out ! So go to sites.google.com to try them and in the case you have already a google apps account and you use the pages app, strangely enough, you have first to disable it, before being able to add the new sites app aka wikis !!

UPDATE: These wikis are here to integrate other google apps like documents and spreadsheets, but one thing that really sucks is that you cannot integrate a private spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has to be published on the whole internet ... I mean if I'm doing a private wiki, I want to share private spreadsheets !