GMail is a fantastic service. What’s not so great, however, is that migrating from GMail to Google’s paid version, Google Apps, is crazy smooth. Here are some tips we’ve picked up from Base Six that have been very helpful when we’ve moved from “private” GMail addresses to Google Apps.
GMail
Make sure the letters go through: Change MX Records
The trickiest thing you need to do to get Google Apps to work is basically just to change your MX records. In essence, you ask your web host nicely, or you go in and change it yourself. Google has a list of which MX records to add.
Transfer the old emails
Assuming we want to keep all our old emails and contacts (which of course we do) we need to transfer them. Either you are lazy and simply set up the mail to be retrieved via POP3. However, this has the disadvantage that ALL mail is marked as new. It’s a pain in the arse, especially if you have a couple of thousand emails (luckily there is a function to mark ALL emails). Once the POP3 process is started, it cannot be cancelled, unfortunately.
Instead, we have used a small programme called Gmail Backup. This programme simply takes a backup of everything you’ve ever done in your Gmail, and moves it to your computer. Then you simply go ahead and run “Restore”, but change the login details to match the new account. This is a very slow process.
Google Calendar
When we change accounts, everything disappears from our calendars. NOT fun! Luckily, we can easily save our calendar in a .zip file in our old calendar (You can find the export function under ‘Settings’). This is just to zip up, and then upload the file in our Google Apps. Easy as pie!
Google Analytics
It is not really possible to migrate Google Analytics. What you have to do instead is simply add the new account as an administrator for the websites you want to follow. You do this by clicking “Edit” on your websites and then simply adding your new email.
OpenID
Most services today use some form of OpenID. It is therefore important to go to “Advanced tools” and activate this, otherwise it will not work to log in to various services via your Google account. This is necessary, for example, if we use Rapportive to get more information about our contacts.