I started moved from using Gmail to Google Apps For Your Domain. Here are a few resources if you decided to make the move yourself.
Migrating mail:
You lose labels if you do it through the web. If you use Outlook it should be flawless, but you need Education(must be a school) or Premiere edition ($50/user/year)
I'm sorting through my thousands of emails relabeling everythign now, using the keyboard shortcuts for the first time and it makes pretty quick work of it.
An excellent resource for migrating from Gmail to Google Apps by someone who's done it. The background is a poor choice and hurts my eyes. http://base6.com/2009/06/15/migrating-from-gmail-to-google-apps/
Contacts, you can export them and import them easily; keeping groups as well.
Calendars can be also exported and imported.
Here is the show stopper for me: the missing features. Last night I was looking for some missing features and came across a thread in Google's Help forum about Buzz in GApps:
Beyond Buzz and Voice, the list is long: Reader, YouTube linking, Google Profiles, Analytics, Latitude, Wave, iGoogle even Google Groups into which you and I are posting right now... these are all services that only work with a Google Account, and don't work (or are mostly broken) with Google Apps accounts.
The poster talks about how Gmail is a free service and gets all the new features and integration and paying Premier members of GApps have to fight for them. This is ultimately what swayed me. As far as I can tell the only advantage for me was signing in and seeing Bazuzi instead of Google in the top left, which, with the new Bazuzi logo from Jan, is pretty cool. I'd then have to wait for all the other features to trickle in. Migrating all those things, and getting friends and family to start following me at a different address along with competing with my gmail address for unique addresses and accounts(already claimed my Google Profile with Gmail) was going to be frustrating and fragment my audience.I'm sad I won't be using the family domain to log in, but that's it. I still give out my email address as MyFirstName@MyLastName.com and that's pretty cool.
5 comments:
When viewing a page with a difficult background I select the text (Ctrl-A).
Lifehacker recently covered this topic, and one of the interesting things they mentioned is that you can use a Google Apps account to sign up for a Google Account (ie, the one you use for Reader, Blogger, etc). Unfortunately, Google won't let you change the primary email address associated with a Google Account, or this process would be much easier for you. You can add your Apps address to your Google Account as an alternate email address, meaning you can sign in with it... but yeah.
I use my GAFYD address to sign in to other Google Services (iGoogle, Reader, Profiles, Picassa, Voice, Blogger). I really want my email to come from my GAFYD account, so I use GAFYD for mail, calendar, and docs. Everything else is the regular Google Account with my GAFYD email address.
It's kinda a pain.
I use pretty much the same hack as Jay. It's... irritating, at best. I don't think I would recommend migrating from an established Gmail Google account to a GAFYD one, but the current domain is the first time I'd really started using GA - so not so much effort to migrate my prior Google account.
Particularly fun, by the way, is switching back and forth between two GAFYD accounts , which is what I do when shifting from work to personal stuff. Add Safari's enthusiastic caching to the mix, and it can be quite perplexing.
When I have to sign in to a different Google account I use Chrome's incognito mode and it doesn't sign me out of my account.
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