SfGuardUser sync with Google Apps

As I am working for a university, we have recently migrate all our staff to use Google Apps for Education and we plan to move all our students and alumni too later this year. Google Apps for Education is really a great tool (and free for us ;-), most of our users are really happy of the switch: it is reliable, fast and have so many collaborative features. Bye bye Outlook :-(, welcome to the Cloud :-)
The Education package is the same as the Business package, including API and a lot of good stuff. The online Google Apps tools to manage users and groups is easy and simple but quickly become too simple to use when you are dealing with thousands of users, you then need to develop your own tool to maximize your daily operation. The "official" PHP5 Google Apps library is GData from the Zend Framework, which make it a breeze to integrate it with Symfony.

a view of an admin generator with Google Apps account management (using sfAdminThemejRollerPlugin):

We are currently redeveloping our University Management System based on Symfony 1.2 and we plan to integrate most of our applications with symfony too, including a research project on a new social learning platform.

I developed a Symfony task (sf1.2+Doctrine) that take a csv file and create your local sfGuardUser as well as the corresponding Google apps accounts. The Google accounts creation is optional so the task can be used for a normal batch user creation with Symfony alone. A simple:

./symfony guard:batch-create-user your.csv --googleapps=yourdomain.com

...will do the trick for you! I am not sure whether publishing the source code might be interesting for others (the Google API is only available for Premier and Education customers)...let me know. We will eventually publish our University management system as an open source project later for sure.

Here is a list of issues and recommendations while dealing with Google Apps Provisioning API:

• Google Apps API error reporting: when you have an error while dealing with Google Apps API, errors messages are useless, you always get a 'server errors' message without more details, it is then very difficult to debug your code to find the issue.
• Don't forget some of the basic Google Apps rules for account creation such as a password with minimum 6 characters otherwise you get back one of those unmeaning-full error message.
• sfGuard is using sha1 as the default encryption method but it adds a grain of 'salt' on it therefore you cannot send to Google Apps the correct sha1 password. I had to overwrite the default setPassword() and checkPassword() to simply remove the use of the salt and make sure my password synchronization with Google Apps can work. I am not sure if it is a huge security concern though, any idea? Beside this you can also use md5 for your password but you will not be able to use another algorithm since Google Apps is only accepting sha1 and md5.

Gmail on steroid

The guys in Google working on Gmail are not stopping their innovation while the crisis is around...and this is good for us! They have launched (in beta only, within the "labs") a couple of very useful features:

• Tasks. You can simply add email to a todolist, it is simple but extremely useful. From there you manage your task (due date, completed, related email,notes...). I started to use it and did not stop.
  
• Offline mode. This is a killer feature for sure! With Google Gears installed (while HTML5 is on the way) you can use Gmail even without any Internet connection. This is a big step forward to make Gmail a powerful tool. This offline is also available for Google Reader and Documents (Calendar is also coming). With those enhancements (plus a couple of smaller one), I gave up to use Apple Mail for my main pro email account, Gmail is really convenient.
• Gtalk plugin. A few month ago Google release a browser plugin to add audio and video to your Gmail chat. Basically you got a skype replacement inside Gmail, this is great too.

There are many more new "Labs" features that could be useful for anyone, don't miss them!

Since I know that all those good guys in Google are reading my blog everyday ;-) I would like to request a few more things:

1. please help us to easily manage multiple gmail accounts.
   
2. If Google Gears was able to install in Mozilla Prism we could have a kind of desktop client for GMail...and first point would be already solved!
   

Don't forget that all those new features are provided in "Labs" and are still experimental.

No limit for Firefox

This is simple but brilliant! Alex made what he called "FoxGlove", it is a portable Firefox 3.0 based, fully customized to better integrate with all Google Apps such as Gmail, GCal, Docs, GTalk, Notebook and so on. It is very easy to take on a USB key everywhere. It also integrate a Google Chrome-like theme and you can have several versions with different Google Accounts open at the same time. Indeed it is very very usefull...at least for me ;-)

Why Google did not think about this before?
Defenitively there is no limit to Firefox customization power!



http://lifehacker.com/5097728/foxglove-standalone-google-apps-portal

Gmail got voice and video

They never sleep in Googleplex! They launched yesterday video and voice chat within gmail. I am eager to test this live. It will for sure shake the all IM market that was not very innovative lately. I like that, we are going to see innovation again in this area hopefully ;-)
Don't forget, you need to install a plugin first.

http://www.google.com/mail/help/videochat/learnmore.html