Domain Name Strategy For iLeadSchools

Since its inception in 2008, SCVi Charter school has used GoDaddy hosted services for E-Mail and Web Content under the scvcharterschool.org domain.  All employees of the school receive a First.Last@SCVCharterSchool.org e-mail address.

SCVi is part of a growing organization and is involved in opening a second school in Lancaster California under the "iLead Schools" name. We are also looking at moving to Google Apps For Education. With so much changing, it makes for a perfect time to re-visit our hosting strategy and domain names. We are currently considering the following structure for our web and e-mail presence for the entire organization.

This diagram shows the structure. Each school will have their identity and autonomy but will have brand recognition under the iLeadSchools name.

• SCVi
• All current employees of SCVi will receive a new First.Last@scvi-k12.org e-mail address. which is hosted by Google.
  
• Legacy @scvcharterschool addresses will continue to work and will forward to the @scvi-k12. address.
  
• SCVi will be part of iLeadSchools but will retain its own identity within the organization.
  
• This is for multiple reasons
• There is equity in the SCVi name
• There is a strong school identity with Parents and Students. (SCVi sweatshirts)
  
• We are known as SCVi in several web sites, databases, and publications
• There is a local identity in the "SCV" initials.
• iLeadSchools
• ileadschools.org will be the parent organization and will have a web site that represents all the schools from a high level.
  
• Schools within the organization will optionally have their own web site which is linked to from the ileadschools.org web site.
  
• All employees in the organization will receive a First.Last@ileadschools.org e-mail address hosted by Google. For folks who represent the entire organization, this will be their primary mail address.  For folks working at schools with their own identity, this will simply be a forward to their school based address.
  

Site Organization

We are expecting that each domain will have a corresponding Google Apps domain. Though, this is still somewhat TBD. It is not yet clear if the ileadshools.org domain will need to be a google instance or not.  Each Google Apps domain has their own instance of the following.

• Google Sites : School Web Site
• Google Mail : Mail for that domain
• Google Docs : Documents and document sharing
• Google Groups : Mail aliases for the domain.
• Google Calendar : Web based calendar. 

There may also be multiple DNS aliases pointing to each domain.