Google Docs Issue

Background

The UMS is exploring opportunities to move student mail to  a Google powered platform.  Under this plan, a student would have a @maine.edu email account, but it would be located on a Google server.  Google would allow us to use our domain and brand the email appropriately.  Several universities have done this, the most notable being Arizona State University.

 The Systems and Operations people who are working this noted that some Google users had already started to create Google accounts using maine.edu.  To ensure that this wouldn't get out of hand, ITS took control of the @maine.edu domain within Google and is sitting on it until a final decision/deal can be reached to move students to Google mail.

 
Current Situation

 If someone from outside of the UMS creates a Google doc and sends a doc directly from Google docs to an @maine.edu address, Google sees the address and modifies the link so the recipient can open it with their UMS Google account.  When the UMS recipient clicks on the Google doc link, the modified link redirects them to a page to sign in to their UMS Google account.  UMS users don't have Google accounts at this time, so they can't log in to see the doc.

 Work Arounds

 1. The sender can stop this from happening, by copying the Google doc link into an email and sending that email, rather than trying to send the link from inside Google docs.

 2.  The recipient can repair the link so it won't bring them to a Google UMS log in page by removing the /a/maine.edu from the link.

- The link as Google has modified it for UMS recipients will look like:  http://docs.google.com/a/maine.edu/Doc?id=.....

- The link changed back to the original will look like http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=...