UsefulConcept

I recently had to under go a process of setting up our company with google apps or otherwise known as google for domains.  It is a really powerful set of email tools, however for those already using email it isn't as simple as we would wish it for moving everyone over. 

Here are a couple of things to expect:

There are two types of accounts for most businesses.  Free, and Premier.  Premier is $50/user per year.  The main benefit for most of you will be the email migration utility and scheduling conference rooms and other times within the shared calendar.  We ended up paying, as we wanted to migrate email.

Migrating email is doable, but not what I expected.  For those of you who use outlook, and keep no email on the server, google has no tools for you.  You can dump your calendar, and contacts, but not email.  Googles email migration utility connects to IMAP email servers (including gmail itself).  I hear there are outside utilities to do the other email transfer, but I haven't tried them.

When moving people over from old gmail accounts there are three things to move:

1. Email - use the migration utility and move over via IMAP.  Gmail's server is imap.gmail.com and the port is 993, use SSL encryption.
2. Calendar - Go to your calendars settings, click on sharing, then your calendar.  You should see a private address link to ical at the bottom.  click on that and save the file to your HD.  Next, open the new calendar account, and import that ical file to the new calendar.
3. Contacts - Open your contacts view and click on export, save it as csv file, and then use that file to import similarly on your new contacts page.

I have also connected to other usual imap servers for my other users.  Only thing I wasn't able to move over were the two users still using outlook and keeping email locally.  I may look into another utility for that later.  There is this blog post regarding moving email over which is pretty good, though involves many steps I wasn't interested in.  Namily moving data via POP to another server based account that supports IMAP, then migrating from there.  If you don't have money to upgrade the google apps account, this may be an option for you.

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