Companies get Gmail migration tool

Companies and organisations using Google Apps Premier and Education Editions will be able to migrate existing email archives to Gmail.

Administrators can use a self-service wizard to securely transfer existing email data from an IMAP server over to users' Gmail accounts on Google Apps. Gmail will put messages into conversation threads, display the original sender, recipient, and date of messages, and convert existing mail folders into labels. And all these old messages will be instantly searchable.

"We're excited about the new mail migration feature because it will make it easier for organisations to give their old email new life - in many cases, that email is sitting in storage, covered with metaphorical dust and difficult to search," Google explained.

Vikaram Gupta, software engineer, Google Apps, said that one of the first organisations to use the migration tools, Central Piedmont Community College in the US, replaced its old email system for 30,000 users in just three weeks, with three million emails moving from the college's server to Google's in 24 hours.

Google is also implementing several other new features that will be available to users over the coming weeks. These include a shared address book across the local network and an increase in the Gmail attachment size to 20MB.

The ability to create charts in a spreadsheet is being added to Google Docs & Spreadsheets charts ahead of a visual overhaul designed to make it much easier for users with dozens or even hundreds of documents to search, locate and organise documents.

There will also be improved support for multi-user chats, letting users invite multiple contacts into the same chat on the Google Talk gadget from their Start Page.

Google Apps launched in August 2006 and includes word processing, spreadsheet, email, instant messaging and voice-over-IP services all accessed on the web via a browser. A Pro version was introduced in February of this year.

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