Migrating from Gmail to Google Apps

cc licensed by Mykl Roventine on Flickr

We have just moved the school over to using Google Apps for our email/etc requirements. Migrating the old accounts over from @mail wasn’t a problem at all, but for people that are already using a personal Google account (lots of our staff now do) I wanted to write some quick instructions for moving data between the two.

Thought it might be useful for someone else as well so publishing on the blog.

Email

There are two options for moving your email from a personal account to a Google Apps account:

1. From your personal account, forward any email you would like to appear in the school one to your Google Apps address. You can do this one message at a time, so not ideal if you have lots to move.
2. Let your network administrator migrate all of the email from your personal account for you. The admin control panel for Google Apps has an IMAP migration tool which can be used to move complete content of a personal Gmail account to the new accounts.

Basically, if there aren’t many messages go with option 1. If you’d like everything moved/original labels/etc preserved so you can then sort though go with option 2.

Contacts

To import contacts and contact groups to your Google Apps account:

1. In your personal Gmail account click on ‘contacts’
2. Click ‘Export’ on the top right
3. Select which group of contacts you wish to export, and export in Google CSV format
4. Go to your Google apps email account
5. Click on ‘contacts’ and then ‘import’ on the top right
6. Select the file you exported in step 3 and upload

Calendars

To view/add/edit an existing calendar in your school account:

1. In your personal Google Calendar account click the dropdown arrow next to the calendar you wish to share (in the My Calendars panel on the left of the screen)
2. Select the ‘share this calendar’ option
3. Enter your Google apps email address into the ‘Share with specific people’ setting
4. Change the permission settings to ‘Make changes AND manage sharing’
5. Press ‘Save’
6. In your Google apps email account you will get an email confirming you have access to the calendar, load your Google apps calendar and it should appear

Documents

To share documents from your personal account with the Google apps account:

1. In your personal google docs select the documents you with to share (you can view lots and do select all here too)
2. From the ‘share’ menu at the top select ‘invite people…’
3. Add  your Google apps email account in the Invite: field
4. Press send
5. In your Google apps email account you should get a notification that these documents have been shared, they will now appear in your Google apps docs

This covers the core set of tools. Next thing to look at is migrating Google Sites, I suspect this will be a very similar process though.