After a detailed presentation of Google's SaaS offering in the first three parts of the book, one important question remains: which strategy is the best suited for moving an existing system towards this new model? In this last part, we attempt to answer this question and provide readers with best practices that ensure the success of such a project. These three chapters are aimed at any project manager or technical leader who is in charge of organizing or managing such a migration project. Our approach is essentially based on pragmatic thinking and real-life experience with migration projects.
To start with, Chapter 12 describes and proposes various possible strategies depending on the type of company. There are actually five strategies; they primarily depend on the number of employees, on geographic dispersion, on the existing mail solution, and on which Google Apps are required. The five strategies are ranked from the simplest to the most complex. Each one defines which tasks should be planned: preliminary study, pilot project, setting up user support, migration itself, and advanced integration with the IS. Finally, we summarize which strategies we believe are optimal for eight different types of companies.
Chapter 13, The Pilot Project focuses on the pilot project, which is often a key to a successful migration. This is a full-fledged project whose role is to define the perimeter. Just as for any other project, it is important to identify and prioritize the requirements. The Google Apps offering is quite broad and it certainly makes no sense to cover all aspects in a pilot project. A set of questions to ask in order to select the most significant topics to deal with in the pilot project, are given in this chapter. Another important aim of the pilot project is to let users try out the solution. This often turns out to be very important because it will help define an appropriate level of support for users once the migration has been completed. One last motivation for the pilot project is to check the technical feasibility of both the migration operations and the advanced integration solutions with the existing IS.
Chapter 14, Performing the Migration describes the course of an actual migration and which Google tools are available for data recovery from existing mail, calendars, and contacts. In the interest of brevity, we shall concentrate on the two market leaders, namely Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes. In the Microsoft world, there are tools that allow an end user to take charge of the migration of his own data and we present those, too. Finally, we provide tables which summarize which versions of which mail systems are supported by Google's software.