In part 1 I went through the process of deciding what service to use for my mail and ended up going with Google Apps. It allows me to keep my existing domain name, I can access my data from just about anywhere, I have access to a calendar and contacts and best of all its free. In part 2 I’ll go through the steps I used to get everything up and running and detail a couple of gotcha’s the almost had me going back to my home servers.
The plan
The plan is simple, get email off my home servers and onto Google Apps. I don’t have a tonne of email, there are 5 accounts total and about 2GB’s of data but it was important to keep all my folders and settings once moved. As stated in Part 1 there is the option to setup a secondary domain and move users over slowing. Since I don’t have many email addresses I decided to just move over all at once. The steps went something like this, create account on Google Apps, setup domain, create users, migrate mail, change DNS, setup clients.
Account
I’m not going to go through all the steps in creating an account, Google’s help menu is very easy to follow and gives step by step instructions for getting an account created and setting up your domain. What you need to know is where to sign up, not sure why but Google doesn’t make it easy to figure out which is the free service and what is paid, not sure why? First point your browser to http://www.google.com/apps; under Apps Editions select Standard, this is the free version. Click Get Started and on the next screen you can either add an existing domain you own or purchase one from Google for $10/yr.
The next screen asks for basic contact information and you have the option to give information about your company but it’s not required, one thing to note, the email address you supply must be a different domain than the one being added. Next screen creates the account used to access the Google Apps admin panel, I created an account that was completely new and not part of any user account being moved over. At this point the domain being added need to be verified and can be done a couple of ways, easiest for me was to upload a file to the server hosting my domain. Once verified you now have access to the control panel for changing settings and setting up accounts. I recommend going through the Setup Guide, it is very comprehensive will answer just about any question.
At this point the choice between migrating slowly or cutting over right away needs to be made, I chose to move all my data all at once then cutover. This meant moving all the data then changing my Name Servers to point mail to Google rather than my home machine.
Migration
Setting up user accounts and initial settings are better answered in the setup guide so I won’t go through it here. Once the user accounts were setup it now time to move some data. Google has a great little tool that can upload all data from Outlook directly into the new account. Is called Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook and can be downloaded here. The only caveat is that the tool needs to be used by the user account that the data is being moved for. Not a big deal when dealing with only a few users but for a larger organization better tools are available with the paid service. To move a 700MB mailbox took approximately 4-5hrs, I’d recommend doing this during off hours when mail delivery is low.
Setup & Gotchas
Now that the data has been moved over it’s time to setup mail, contacts and calendar. This is by far the biggest change to get used to, with Outlook everything was managed by Exchange. Email and calendar events were handled by the database as well as the Global Address Book,on top of that the local address book was stored within Exchange making it accessible anywhere and on any device. With Exchange I could login to any machine and setup my profile and all my data was there. Moving to Google Apps means that email, contacts and calendar would be separated into 3 different areas and since I’ll be using an IMAP client to access email rather than using the web interface I needed to find a solution to have all my data in one place.
Gotcha #1
There is no complete solution, other than using the web interface and to be honest I really hate the gmail interface. Using IMAP and Google tools email and calendar events can can be managed just fine but contacts is another issue, at this time there is no way (that I know of) to sync up contacts. What I’ve done in the mean time is to export all my contacts and then import them back in. Not a very clean solution but as long as there aren’t a bunch of changes works for now.
Gotcha #2
One of the great things about using Google Apps is the integration with mobile devices, syncing mail, contacts and calendar with iPhone or iPad is much easier than trying to do it on the desktop. For the iPhone and iPad just create a Microsoft Exchange account and use m.google.com as the server. Everything gets sync’d, no issues. So why is this a Gotcha? It has to be enabled, took me 2 days to figure out why this wouldn’t work even though everything I read said it does.
To enable Google Sync: from the mail dashboard select Mobile then Check Enable Google Sync, save changes and you are good to go.
Conclusion
All in all Google makes the move to Apps very easy, the setup was simple, creating accounts was simple, even migrating data was not that difficult. The only real issue I ran into was how to sync contacts on my desktop, using Google Sync on the iPhone and iPad works well but for the desktop I’ll need to find a different solution or move to the paid service.
For a small office with only a few users and email addresses, this is a great option, you get full email support, including 7GB of storage and message filtering. You can keep your existing domain and email addresses and you have none of the hassles of managing your own servers.
Place your comment