Google Apps implementation part 1

Welcome to my blog. Over the last few months I've been planning to roll-out Google Apps for Education at our school, and during the recent Christmas break, I've made a start. At the time of writing this, I've got Active Directory populating and synchronizing users and passwords with Google Apps (using the Google Directory Sync Tool). So far, I haven't publicized it to my end users (as they are all on holiday anyway...) and I haven't enabled Gmail as I need to do some more work on migrating from our existing email system. The only real gotcha that I came up against was synchronizing passwords. Active Directory stores it's passwords in binary, and the Sync tool can only read plain text, MD5 or SHA-1. To get around this, I've got this filter installed and configured on my DCs, which in turn populates an LDAP field with an SHA-1 password which is then read by the sync tool. The field doesn't get updated until the user's AD password is changed at least once, but after that it seems to work well. I haven't got Single Sign on going (and am not sure if I will try yet). So this next week it's the bit where I get to further explain to staff what Google Apps is, how it can benefit them, and how they can logon. Then it's implementing Gmail, and then rolling it out to the 800 or so girls at school