I know this was posted a while ago but have stumbled across it today. I would certainly recommend running your Office Suite along side GApps for a while until GApps has more of the features of Office. You will always have power users of office so not sure you will get rid of it completely. However I am sure students would embrace it far quicker than the older generation and I am not sure the students ever use all the features of the Office or really need to. If you need the features of Office look at http://www.godocsync.com/ which integrates office with GDocs. You are able to save Office Docs into the cloud.

Moodle 2.0 will have a Repository API that will give the user the ability to bring resources from GDocs into Moodle. It will support many other repositories. Here is a link that show the various repositories that will be supported. http://docs.moodle.org/en/Repository_API

Hope this helps.

Regards
Les

I am probably late into this discussion. We have had a Google Domian for our 600 pupil junior school (7-11) for the last year. I started by rolling it out for staff and ended up rolling it out for Year 4 & 6 pupils after staff requests. We also had three years on Moodle and 2 years on Studywiz as our VLEs.

For us the biggest plus is the collaboration. Being able to create a folder in Docs make it view only or edit and then share it with others enables real time collaboration.
http://philbagge.blogspot.com/search/label/Goog...
Staff find that network documents can occasionaly be only opened in read only as others are using them. This is especially true of shared planning across 5 classes in each year group. With GDs all staff / pupils can edit at the same time. You are right to say that GDs is limited in terms of rich word processing tools, we especially miss a reasonable table tool in the word processor. Users make documents with complicated tables in MS office and then upload and share these in the Google cloud. The template feature is also useful in that you can create a proforma in Word, convert it into a GDoc and then upload it as a template where everyone else in your domain can use it. I am considering scrapping MS office on non staff PC's and installing open office to save money. I think at present you do need some form of external editor for richer features. I agree with your comments on Powerpoint and Multimedia but education has had death from powerpoint so not sure if this is such a big issue and lets be fair outside contrived lessons how often do we really need to animate slides or add video or sound?

The big thing going for live@edu is the storage space 25gb per user for any doc type and the possibility of migrating to sharepoint 2010 in the future. I have signed up for a trial of this with my County. If we only use the storage space it will be worth it especially if I can map drives. I suspect that we will concentrate on Google Domain but keep a close eye on live@edu.

I have staff who are using our VLE really well and staff who are using Google Domain well. Personally I think I can do most things with Google but good practice is good practice and I am just pleased it is happening whatever the platform. I miss Moodle as it fostered a shared community which Studywiz has never achieved but I am not sure if it was those cohorts who were pre facebook/bebo hence their adoption of Moodle and that later cohorts have moved on to non school social media such as Facebook and Bebo or if Moodle was just a better tool for discussion as it allowed email subscription?

Google Gadgets are a problem for us. They are blocked in school but pupils could access them at home. Some of these are porn gadgets. You are able to white or black list these but you have to send commands to the shell and that is beyond me. I have not been able to find an easy how to guide either. We cope with this through good digital citizenship, encouraging responsibility through greater tool access to responsible users whilst restricting those who prove less trustworthy.

Finally I am unable to logon as a pupil to see work, investigate issues etc without changing their passwords. There is a way of doing this with oath but it was also beyond me and I was quoted £500 for a poss fix.

Sorry for the ramble

All said I love my Google Domain but not every junior school would be ready for it.

For now I don't see that we could easily give up some form of desktop office
package (whether MS or Open Office), as there are too many useful things
that can't be done in GApps yet!

I'm wondering whether something like
OffiSync<http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?productListingId=3506+18157877874930227237&hp=topRated>might
be enough to bridge the gap and allow us to begin transitioning to the
cloud whilst we wait for the cloud to catch up in some areas… One thing I
really want to achieve is remote access to all files, so would love to find
a cost effective solution that syncs students MyDocs folders to the cloud -
like dropbox but for schools!
Syncplicity<http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?productListingId=393+9547105767200082343&hp=topRated>offer
this but is currently prohibitively expensive for a school, but
apparently they are working on a solution that uses the GDocs storage so
that may bring the price down… If they could offer something using the
google storage for around $3-4/student per year then this would be a
fantastic solution!