Step 2 - hosting

Hosting turned out to be a challange. Since our hosting partner was a local and very small company, they did not have experience with integrating Google Apps before. Two of the original 3 domains were hosted by them. We decided to use them for the new domain, instead of AT&T. The hosting provider's choice of control panel was cpanel, which is OK, but different then the Google Apps instructions. So we had our partner register our new domain and he created the new hosting site. Which will be the main domain for Apps.
If you haven't read through Google's deployment guide, do so. It's what I followed for deploying Google Apps. I'm going through my specific experience.
Since we were deploying a new email domain and Google Apps at the same time, the timing of everything wasn't so important. Basically I can turn everything on and then training. Instead of haveing a Go Live day. It made the process easier, but changing domain's made it harder to swallow for some employees.

So the plan for the hosting is to have 1 main hosting location and 3 add-on domains. If you are not fimilar with an add-on domain, it's a sub-domain that has direct access through it's own domain. As an example, www.domain1.com may have a sub-domain called sub1.domain1.com, well that can also be access via www.sub1.com.
Currently we completed the transition one of the original 3 domains to an add-on domain.

On the hosting side the first step is to verify ownership. You have two options for verifying ownership, 1 is to add add a cname record to your domain registration. This is a temporary record, unnecessary after ownership is verified. I first tried this method. But after a couple days of trying to get it to work and a hosting partner that had never dealt with Apps before I tryed option 2. Uploading an HTML file. This method worked in seconds. They should really recomend this method. The problem with the 1st option in my scenario was our DNS records resided on our hosting providers server and the domain registration was with a partner of theirs. So in the end the HTML was easy, Google gives you a string through the control panel that you add to an HTML file that you upload to your site location. Through the Apps control panel tell Apps to verify ownership and BAM! your done. The HTML can be removed and your onto the next step.