We have somewhere in the region of 900 users, but of these, only 200 or so are important to us. We are thinking of migrating over to Google Apps for business and need to know if we could simply set up (and pay for) 200 accounts, with the other 700 users being taken care of via an email forwarding solution.
Has anyone here got any experience of setting this sort of system up?
Yes, you can set up split delivery. That way, all incoming mail goes through Google's servers, but you can specify which emails are delivered to Gmail inboxes, and which are delivered to inboxes on other servers (like your current email system).
If I understand correctly, this situation applies to you:
If some users use Gmail and others use their legacy accounts, you can have mail delivered to a Gmail account or a legacy mail account depending on the recipient. This option is called split delivery.
See http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=119008
[email protected]). That way, you won't have to change MX records.
Commented
Oct 17, 2012 at 10:14
Yes you can setup groups, email aliases so email can be forwarded and/or shared with multiple users.
http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33343
http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33327
Yes, this can be achieved very easily. You simply switch the MX records of the users you wish to move across to Google Apps and leave the others as they are.
This is a relatively standard feature for most of the Google Apps implementations we undertake as it allows for pilot projects with a subset of users.
You can't specify different MX records for different users. MX records are specific to a domain.
See also these two questions on Server Fault:
