A few weeks ago, Google announced a new plug-in that will sync Google Apps—the enterprise versions of Gmail, contacts, and calendar—with Microsoft’s Outlook, letting customers use Outlook on their desktops if that is what they are comfortable with, and Google Apps will run on the backend. Of course, the plug-in ended up running into a few problems. But the takeaway of the news is that Google is trying to make it simple and cost-effective for enterprise customers to make the switch from more commonly used enterprise applications, such as Microsoft’s Outlook, to Google Apps. Today, Google is adding the ability to migrate from another popular enterprise app, IBM’s Lotus Notes.
The new tool lets customers migrate mail, calendar and contacts from Notes to Google Apps. The syncing tool, which Google says is a native Notes application, can be installed and configured in less than 30 minutes, for multiple users at once. The tool has already been tested with 40 of Google’s enterprise clients, including JohnsonDiversey (10K users) and Valeo (32K users). The tool is free for Google Apps Premier and Edu customers.
