ITBHUGlobal.org: The Chronicle: ITBHUGlobal.org website receives Google Apps Education Edition

ITBHUGlobal.org website receives Google Apps Education Edition

@ Apr 30, 2009

(Forwarded by Animesh Pathak, CSE 2003. Email: Animesh@gmail.com)

We are pleased to state that website run by our alumni association has received approval from Google Apps Team through its email dated April 17, 2009.

The Google offer is for www.itbhuglobal.org, the official website for IT-BHU global Alumni Association. We are currently using Google Apps, but with limited numbers of accounts and features. Now, with our non-profit status and Google approval, we can have unlimited numbers of accounts and more features to use.

The institute’s website www.itbhu.ac.in already receives Google Apps services due to accredited educational institution status of IT-BHU. In fact, our institute was among the first institutes in India to use Google Apps. The institute’s website was set up with a dedicated group of alumni led by Anshuman Singh (Electrical 1998).

The approval is given by Google after we received tax-exempt status (as a non-profit organization) from Internal Revenue Service of US Government last month.

http://www.itbhuglobal.org/chronicle/archives/2009/03/index-alumni-world.php#004193

The best part is that now the Google Apps is free to us because of US Govt. granting us status as non-profit organization. Google Apps provides free service to recognized Educational Institutes and organizations with non-profit status.

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About Google Apps:

The Google Apps service was launched in August 2006. Google Apps provides the users of a domain with large email boxes just like Gmail (which they can also read using outlook and mobile phones, and also forward to normal addresses). In addition, it also allows them to use shared documents and spreadsheets, much like you do today using Google docs.

The big part is - the users can now have IDs @itbhuglobal.org, and we can give proper email inboxes (with POP/IMAP/space) to ALL our members, as opposed to simple email redirection.

The users can also create their own small websites on a section of our website such as http://sites.itbhuglobal.org/ (this will be of interest to our future plan for providing users personal pages in version2 of the alumni website)

Google also allows programmatic access to these services, so we can easily integrate this with our existing alumni database system.

More info about Google apps for education (also for non-profits, currently being used in itbhu.ac.in) is at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/index.html

Google app is a set of capabilities that are provided by Google as an online service.

These capabilities include

1. Email accounts

2. Google Docs

3. Google Calendar etc. etc.

We can integrate these capabilities into our website; and all of that with the domain of itbhuglobal.org

All the mailing lists that we have today are managed via the Google email application; so all things like scholarships@itbhuglobal.org are being handled via Google and we don't have to do anything much on our servers.

Just for information, the entire official email of IT-BHU is run via Google Apps. All emails sent to xyz@itbhu.ac.in are actually handled by the Google system. It provides email facility for 3700+ people including all students, faculty and staff.

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