Search engine giant Google added updated versions of their data migration tools for Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, which are available to Google Apps for Business and Education customers. The company noted this year alone, customers have migrated over 3.5 billion emails to Google Apps, along with over 100 million calendar events and 25 million contacts.
The Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange tool lets administrators migrate data for batches of users from Exchange to Google Apps. The new version features performance improvements and supports several additional IMAP servers, including Novell GroupWise, Cyrus, Dovecot and Courier. Users can migrate email from @gmail.com accounts as well with this tool. Google also improved support for PST files and Hosted Exchange with the release.
The Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook tool is designed to allow end-users to migrate email, contacts and calendar data from their Outlook profiles or local PST file to Google Apps. The new version features improvements for Outlook 2003 and 2007, and adds support for 2010. It also includes support for 64-bit versions of Outlook.
If some of a business’s users want to continue using Outlook as their email interface, Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook is the tool for them, which also allows seamless migration of existing data from Outlook into Google Apps (via Google Apps Migration for Outlook), and keeps Outlook email, contacts and calendar data in sync with Google Apps accounts.
Google product manager Aditya Kulkarni noted some customers still choose to operate in a dual-deployment environment, and to that end, the company has also been updating Google Calendar connectors that allow bi-directional look-ups of calendar free/busy information for users in the organization still on Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. The new versions of the Calendar Connectors also now support the new Google Apps account infrastructure that brings more than 60 additional Google applications to Google Apps accounts.