Google Simplifies Exchange Migration and Data Retention -- Redmondmag.com

The Schwartz Report

Google Simplifies Exchange Migration and Data Retention

As Google targets everything from serving ads in your thermostat, to making a driverless car, machine learning and now broadband communications with its reportedly planned $1 billion investment in satellite technology, the search giant is also stepping up its less glamorous effort of developing an alternative to everyday enterprise services offered by Microsoft.

Google has won its share of big conversions from Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, but experts say the majority of enterprises moving their messaging and collaboration efforts to the cloud are going with Office 365. Now Google is looking to make the switch easier. Last week, Google said enterprises can migrate from Exchange Server to Google Apps with its cloud-based data migration service directory from the Admin console to the Gmail servers.

The direct migration offering replaces the need for the Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange tool, which customers had to install on their local mail servers. The new migration service also lets administrators monitor the progress of the migration. The new migration service currently only works for e-mail, with calendar migration currently under development. Google is making the new e-mail migration service available on its Gmail servers over the next two weeks.

Google said the migration service currently is suitable for the following:

Microsoft Exchange servers that support Exchange Web Services (EWS), specifically Office 365 and Exchange Server 2007 SP1 or higher.
IMAP servers, including Gmail, Exchange 2003 or lower, and ISPs like GoDaddy.

Google last month also made it easier to manage retention of mail and documents on Google Apps via its Google Vault service. "The options for setting or modifying a retention period -- the length of time your company's messages are archived in Google Vault -- are now more and we've added safeguards when setting a retention period for a specified number of days," Google said in a blog post last month.

Organizations using Microsoft Outlook with Google Apps can now add, manage and join Hangout video calls by downloading a plug-in to Outlook.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/02/2014 at 8:51 AM

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