One of the things that's a bit ghetto of groups in Google Apps is that groups are really just a glorified alias file. Users cannot manage their subscription, get emails delivered in batches, and there's no message archive unlike Google Groups or a Mailman managed list. And this is the same problem with Microsoft Exchange (at least up to 2007, probably 2010 too).
Okay, so ranting aside, here's a couple quick hacks to squeeze a couple features out of groups in GA.
Archiving. Create a mailbox, add it to the group. Shazzam! This is better in Exchange were you can share that mailbox easily with many users and limit them to read-only access so people aren't deleting your archive.
Mailing list features. Well, you're only answer for now is going to be to forward messages to a mailing list. So point mylist@example.com to mylist-example-com@googlegroups.com and members should subscribe directly to the Google Group instead.
Aliases. Now this is one feature I would have preferred in the face of the above limitations of GA groups. That is, if I've got a group called "hibuddy@example.com", I also want to have "heybuddy@example.com" and other variations. So here, create a mailbox called "hibuddy@example.com" and rename (or create) a group called "hibuddy-group@example.com". You can add as many aliases as you want to the mailbox, and then configure that mailbox to just forward to the group.
Ciao
- Arch
