Migrating from Google Apps to Windows Live Domains

It's been a month since we had a smooth transition from Google Apps to Windows Live Domains for our email/app needs. The documents/resources we had to refer to for the same weren't much comprehensive, so we had to find our own workarounds.

We had to make a hard choice of forfeiting our beloved Google Apps (a) Google Custom Domains account to find a lighter on cost (free) alternative for our emailing needs and primarily being Linux users offered us more problems to solve as the alternative we found suitable is from Microsoft.

We had been using the following resources on our old Google Apps account:

• Email - Gmail, with advanced Filters & Labels
• Calendar
• Documents [Drive]
• Chat [GTalk]
• Google+
• Hangout
• Google Sites
• Groups (email lists)

I'll try to cover up the migration methods we followed to get these moved onto the new Microsoft account.

We were most interested in migrating our Email with internal mailing lists & Documents [Drive] to the new account. Others can just be set up from the scratch - eg: GTalk alternative - MSN.. and our top priority was a friction-free migration without any downtime.

Signup for a new Microsoft Account & Create User Accounts

First things first - we went on to sign up for a new Microsoft Windows Live domain account (https://domains.live.com/) & haven't done the domain mappings at this point in time. Also, created our user accounts to allow the migration of data.

We did not have too many accounts to be migrated & hence manually creating accounts one by one was a viable option. You may have to find your workaround if you have too many accounts to migrate.

Email Migration

We were a bit concerned about the privacy of data & hence we decided to migrate the email data ourselves, and not rely on 3rd party providers who could fully automate the migration process when given our account credentials [for a premium].

There was one officially recommended solution to migrate from Gmail to Hotmail - https://www.trueswitch.com/winlive -- but that doesn't seem to work for migration to windows live custom domains, at the time of this writing. Another issue with using trueswitch is that the accounts we have to transfer from & transfer to will look the same (user@knackforge.com -> user@knackforge.com), as we're just migrating our existing accounts.. which surely the trueswitch system wouldn't be able to handle with ease.

We also sought any software tools that we could run on our desktop or on a Linux server to transfer our emails. Though we couldn't find any aptly suitable tool, the Microsoft Outlook desktop app looked close to what we needed. We could simply connect both accounts on the Outlook app, select all emails & simply drag-drop onto a new account.. neat! We know that IMAP allows server-to-server direct email transfer, so we enabled IMAP on our old accounts. Though Microsoft uses a different variant of IMAP, we believed that our emails will be transferred directly to the new account without having to be downloaded on the local desktop. But, we came to know that emails are downloaded locally & then uploaded to a new account. Our bulky inboxes don't make this a viable option without downtime.

Finally, we had to settle down with adding the old account in the email interface of the new account [add POP account option], by logging into each of the new accounts. We didn't rely much on the POP protocol for an error-free complete transfer of emails, but we had no choice but to settle for this. It looked like our Sent email history & Chat history weren't transferred, and we have to compromise on that as well.

After all old emails are transferred, we removed the POP account added on the Microsoft Live account & made the DNS changes required to redirect emails to the new Microsoft inbox. We created an email forwarding rule to forward emails from old Google Apps accounts to the new accounts, to not miss out on emails received before the migration is complete. Perhaps removing the POP account after about 1/2 weeks after the DNS change is done can also do the job.

Email Features Migration (Filters, Label, Archive, etc.,)

• We had minimal filters support on the new account & we have no choice but to live with that
• Folders & Categories came as a rescue for Labels, but it's not as comprehensive as Gmail's
• We certainly miss the "Archive" button to keep the Inbox clean. But, we're quite happy with the FLAG feature as an alternative to keep important Inbox emails on top of the Junk.
• Our email's timestamps were shown wrongly & it turns out to be that, Microsoft wasn't smart enough to set our correct timezone based on the location of signup. Visiting https://account.live.com/EditProfile.aspx & updating timezone {once for each user} fixed the issue, however.

Calendar Migration

We didn't have too many Calendar items to migrate, except for a few recurring reminders. So we were just happy to re-create our Calendar items. Also - I believe there will be a way to export & import calendar items.

Documents Migration

We were surprised with the availability of a Google Drive alternative in the form of Skydrive and though it doesn't look/work as great as Google Docs, it just gets the job done.

We simply downloaded all documents from Google Drive using the Export option & then added them onto Skydrive, and shared them among the team.

Chat Migration

Though chat support is provided within the interface of outlook.com {we upgraded our Hotmail/live accounts to the newer outlook.com}, we didn't find it very useful in real-time due to the lack of Desktop Notifications support & it won't show a list of currently logged in contacts unless clicked on the compose Chat Message box.. which is annoying as well.

We were looking for a decent Linux Desktop client, that can support Group Chat, and file transfers.. and after many iterations, we settled with https://www.amsn-project.net/ -- which is a very good native Linux client. We're very happy with its notification system, group chat & it's sleek intuitive UI.

Still, there's a problem here: the outlook.com interface doesn't have a way to turn off CHAT & MSN can't login simultaneously in both web & desktop. The fix was simple: creating an /etc/hosts entry as: "127.0.0.1 geo.messenger.services.live.com" did the trick.

Update: skype integration with Microsoft MSN eliminates the above-mentioned overhead and we've got Skype as Chat / Hangout alternative for our @knackforge.com accounts!

Google+, Google Sites Migration

We're out of luck, there seem to be no alternative solutions.. But, we're okay with leaving out these feature on the new account & have it as an account that gives primary importance to email.

Hangout Migration

Though we don't have an alternative at this time, we're sure that the upcoming MSN-Skype integration will solve our Group-Call migration problem & serve as a decent Hangout alternative.

Internal Email List / Google Groups Migration

We extensively used the Google Groups as an internal mailing list to communicate with team members. It's a surprise that Windows Live domains don't support mailing lists out of the box. We had to sneak out with an alternative. We came up with a solution that relies on an external mailing list provider [on a different domain name] & has a forwarding account on the primary domain name.

Our old Google Groups account is still active & will always be active, though not much activity will take place. We activated the google-test-a.com domain on our account and our old {group-id}@knackforge.com will now be ready to listen at {group-id}@knackforge.com.google-test-a.com & keep doing its usual email forwarding business.

We then created a new account on the Windows Live domains: {group-id}@knackforge.com and have it forwarded to the {group-id}@knackforge.com.google-test-a.com address.

We were confronted with two major issues with the above method:

1. Only the emails that aren't detected as SPAM will be forwarded: Microsoft's SPAM filter cannot be turned off & we could miss out on legitimate emails {infact we missed out few important emails}. To fix this - we removed the usual Forwarding Address method to forward emails & instead created a new filter, that will forward to the group-id of google-groups if the sender's address contains "@".
2. We have to log in to our FORWARDING accounts on the Microsoft account once in a while, to avoid that account being deleted: We just set up a few reminders to log in to the forwarding accounts once in a while & are quite happy to just do the process manually.

That's pretty much the amount of work we carried on to get us transferred from Google Apps to Microsoft Live, with no downtime. Do let us know by comments if you find this useful / or if you have a better solution to suggest.