This chapter describes the range of solutions, from Google and its partners, available for uploading data from an existing mail system to Google Apps. Data transfer is here the main issue and most of the chapter is dedicated to this topic. To this day, the most common mail systems are Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes. One section is devoted to each. We review in each case the tools available for migration. The last part examines the remaining possibilities in a more generic way.

The steps of the migration

The migration phase is subject to the following prerequisites:

• The user support plan should be ready
• The pilot project should be completed and consensus should have been reached on its conclusions
• The gaps between the company's requirements, the features of the Google Apps solution, and the readily available third-party solutions should be known
• The user training plan should be defined or even completed
• The reversibility plan should be defined and tested

Once the prerequisites have been validated, the migration proceeds in three steps.

User account creation (see Chapter 7) followed by enabling and configuring Google Apps services are the first two steps of the migration. The last is data transfer.

The three steps of the migration