The way we have it configured is as a front end to a Gmail mailbox. Moving emails from a personal account to a shared account can be done in a couple of ways: 1) forward it to the shared account or 2) if you allow users to share the password for the shared email account (not recommended), in an IMAP client where both accounts are configured, you could drag the email from one account to the other.

I personally prefer forwarding the message. That way everyone can see the history of that message and how it got there. We all know that context for messages in email is in short supply. So I think that anything we can do to maintain or provide more context for the message is helpful.

You are essentially correct. What I’ve found the most useful is to create an email address specifically for the project.

Then you can accomplish shared inboxes in a number of ways:

• give all the group members access to it
• use Email Center Pro to manage it. Email Center Pro adds a nice layer of reporting on top of the mail box plus it requires unique logins. Having unique logins was a critical requirement for us. That way if someone leaves the team, you can simply deactivate their Email Center Pro account. You don’t have to change the password on the underlying GMail account.
• somewhat different – you can use a Google Group for the project. While not part of Google Apps yet (are you listening Google??) its a great way to collaborate on projects if you don’t have to worry about the from address of the emails that are sent out
• ultimately, if you can swing a Google Wave invitation, that looks like it will be excellent for project communication

There are a number of other useful tools in the Apps constellation to help with project management and collaboration. Google Moderator lets users post ideas and other users can vote them up or down. This is a great way to prioritize feature requests or bug fixes. Sites is a useful to put all of the project communication in one place. You can take a look at Google’s example site here.

For migrating email from exchange, there are tools available. We used the free IMAP migration tool from Google. We migrated all of our users’ email over as part of the deployment.

So for us, Google Apps not only replaced Exchange, but SharePoint and a Blackberry server as well. I have been very happy with our decision to move to Google. Most of our users are thrilled with the change.

Good luck with your decision. Feel free to post back with any other questions.

Thanks for the fantastic insights into moving to the Google Apps platform. We are a Non Profit and were looking at moving to a hosted exchange solution but I am being more and more convinced that Google Apps is the way to go.

One of my main concerns was the ability to mimic Public Folder functionality with Gmail. We use public folders as a repository for emails relating to a specific project (more than one person tends to work on a single project and hence they act as shared inboxes for the specific project) – people move relevant mails to the public folder then anyone can search or read these emails.

Having looked at the Email Center Pro offering I am not sure that it would meet our requirements (I could be wrong?) even though it looks like an impressive product. Could you comment on this and whether another option would be to create a new email account for each project (projectXYZ@organisation.org etc) and then provide viewing access to various other users/accounts? Is this possible in Gmail? and would users be able to move email messages to the other account? Would it just be a matter of forwarding the message to that email account?

Finally I was wondering if you could advise of any tools that might be available to migrate some of our users existing MS Exchange emails to Gmail? We host our own email using MS SBS 2003 and most users would want to be able to migrate at least the last couple months worth of emails across to Gmail.

Many thanks!
James
World Education Australia