Google Wave is now available, and on your domain too!

May 26, 2010 Chilling_Silence How-To's / Guides / Tech info

Yes, that’s right, if you’re using Google Apps for your Domain, you can now enable Wave domain-wide! Best part is it’s totally free, and very easy to dive right in!

Google Wave has been in private-beta status since Google I/O 2009, and one year later it’s being opened to the public.

Google Wave is a realtime multi-user combination of both Instant Messaging, Email and Document collaboration service. Basically it means that as you write, the other people who are in the Wave with you (Think of it like a chat conversation) see what is being typed as it happens.

So, how do we get started?

If you already have Google Apps for your Domain, you can easily enable this feature for all of your accounts.

To enable this, simply login to your Google Domain dashboard:
https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomain.com/Dashboard

Obviously adjust yourdomain.com to your actual domain.

It will probably prompt you for your password.

When you’re logged in, you should see a list of of all your enabled services, such as Email, Calendar etc

You want to click on “Add more services” which is just above the enabled services.

You’ll be taken to a new screen where you can select the service you wish to Add to your domain, in this case you want to select Wave.

Anyways, follow your nose a little, but one useful thing that I found was the ability to change the url you access your domains Waves from, much like you can with mail. For example, instead of using:

https://wave.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/
You can have:
https://wave.yourdomain.com/

Much better!

To do this, all you need is to add a CNAME record from wave.yourdomain.com to ghs.google.com

Then, back in your Google Apps Dashboard, if you click on Google Wave, it’ll take you to the subpage to edit the Wave settings for the domain. The first option is: Web Address

Click on Change URL, then enter in your custom URL just as you’ve set it up with your DNS provider.

All done!

Stay tuned as I look to migrate blog hosts to my own provider, so I can start playing around a lot more with Wave and other fun things.

As always, if this has helped you, please leave me a quick message just to say Hi.

Cheers

Chill.

Custom URL, DNS, GAFYD, Google Apps, Google Wave,