The following are recommended settings, policies, or tools needed for rolling out Google Apps to schools/districts of different sizes.

Review the general 8 steps for deployment for an overview of planning a technical roll out.

Small school

Typically small schools have limited IT resources, both in terms of hardware and staffing. With such a small number of users, these schools opt to create and manage users directly through the administrative control panel.
Users - Staff: 35
- Students: 0
Legacy Server - Internet service provider’s mail with IMAP
Provisioning - Users added individually in Control Panel
Migration - IMAP migration for faculty mail.
- Users migrate personal contacts and calendars.
Mail routing - Mail is sent directly to Google



Large school

In a larger school, it can be a burden to create users individually. In these cases, we recommend using the bulk CSV uploader.  The admin creates a CSV file in a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel, and then uploads the file into the administrative control panel.
Users - Staff: 60
- Students: 800
Legacy Server - Mac OS X Server:
  - Mail
Provisioning - Users created in the Control Panel using bulk CSV upload.
Migration - IMAP migration for faculty mail.
- Users migrate personal contacts and calendars.
Mail routing - Mail is sent directly to Google




Large district

School districts tend to have preexisting architecture for managing users. In these cases, we recommend syncing on-site directories to Google using Google Apps Directory Sync.
Users - Staff: 6,000
- Students: 50,000
Legacy Server - Windows Server 2003:
  - Microsoft Exchange
  - Active Directory
Provisioning - Users synced from Microsoft Active Directory using Google Apps Directory Sync.
Migration - Data migrated for faculty using Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange
Mail routing - Mail is sent to Postini for scanning and archival and then sent to Google