Over the past few days I have been spending some free time to put up a new blog for a friend of mine who want to start a new business. Because having just a blog isn’t enough infrastructure I setup a few Google Apps as well.

I was surprised how well integrated everything feels by now.
First off I want you to know that apart from the paid accounts there is in fact a free one that goes beyond testing but Google is good at hiding so here’s a direct link to it.

You get Gmail, Google Drive, Google Documents, Google Calendar and Google Sites. I didn’t bother about Sites as the technology for the blog was chosen already (WordPress).

What I wanted was the following:

• Setting up Gmail addresses for myfriendsdomain.com
• Using mail.myfriendsdomain.com for the Gmail web interface
• Using docs.myfriendsdomain.com for the Documents web interface
• Using calendar.myfriendsdomain.com for the Calendar web interface
• Registering a Google Analytics account from Using admin@myfriendsdomain.com
• Using Google Drive for automated backups of the WordPress installation

First you need to register and validate your domain with your new Apps account.

Then you need to add CNAMEs to your domain using your registrars interface following this instruction.

Registering a new Analytics account with your Apps email address was problematic a few years ago as Apps and other services weren’t integrated at all. But that has changed apparently and now works smoothly.

So the last step was setting up Drive to act as a backup disk. Simply create a client ID and secret usign the Drive console. Then install an appropriate WordPress plugin (I use Google Drive for WordPress).

All in all it took about half an hour to setup everything.

Google Apps · Google+

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