Google Apps for Education

This is pretty forward thinking, but I can see a DrupalEd distribution with the ability to hook into the Google Apps for Education API. Imagine being able to create an account on DrupalEd, having a Google Apps account automatically created for the user, and their Google calendar automatically subscribed to their schedule.

Anyone have experience with the Google Apps for Education API?

Comment~~~Bill Fitzgerald: Google recently opened their APIs to their Provisioning, Email Gateway, and SSO -- these are only open to Google customers in education of the Premier service, so you need to pay for access -- for more detail, see here: http://code.google.com/apis/apps/overview.html

In some ways, while I like the idea (and recognize its inevitability) there are elements within Drupal itself that I see as more pressing. For one example, I'd love to see user-controlled user-level access control to nodes, so that a user, on creating a piece of content, could select a user (or group of users) with CRUD access to the node (in general terms, Buddylist plus ACL integration, or the Node Access Module that played nicely with Organic Groups).

Comment by Reggie Ryan: Having Google Apps availability sounds like a good idea, but at the K12 level, at least in the US, that would be problematic as opening up students to a Google account is not allowed in many districts.

Comment ~~ Sharon Betts: I believe that Google has now given K-12 Educators free access to these tools and the API (although no guarantee on how long).