Google ramped up the noise for its Google Apps this week by offering
a new server-side tool to help organizations and partners migrate
company email, calendar and contact data from Microsoft Exchange to
Google Apps.
The move by Google is only the most recent against incumbent Microsoft
which has dominated the corporate space with its Exchange email,
calendar and contact server.
Google Apps recently celebrated the year anniversary
of its channel partner program, boasting 1,000 reseller partners, some
of which are migrating customers from Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes
and Novell Groupwise. And Google recently announced its acquisition of DocVerse which ultimately promises interoperability between Microsoft Office and Google Apps.
“Today we're making it a lot easier for customers of Microsoft Exchange
to go Google with Apps,” wrote Abhishek Bapna, Product Manager at
Google, in the Official Google Enterprise Blog. The tool is available here.
The tool enables migrations in four steps and allows the administrator
to choose the combination of email, calendar and contact data to be
moved and provides the option of doing the migration in stages. It
enables hundreds of users to be moved at the same time. And users can
continue to use Microsoft Exchange during the migration without any
service interruption.
“The tool has been a boon to our Google Apps partners as well,” Bapna
wrote. For instance, Revevol Consulting CTO Mayooran Rajan noted that
this tool will increase the speed of migrating its customers, which
tend to be from between 100 and 20,000 employees.
Google said the tool works with Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007 and
works with both on-premise and hosted implementations. It’s free with
the Premier and Education Edition of Google Apps.
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Messaging and Collaboration 
