Slashdot had an interesting feature today on Sky’s Botched Google Migration In the UK. There seems to be much consternation out there about this rather large (1 million user) migration. While LTech was not involved in any way on this project, we have been working with our customers on similar migration projects.

The Hermes Project mentions that:

Customers have to go into the Gmail interface and enable POP3 themselves - could they not have done this as a batch job and maintained it via the provisioning interface for new customers?

This would be ideal. Google is aware of this problem, and I know that there has been some buzz on the API group over at Google. Until this is available, having your previous email servers available for a reasonable amount of time (which Sky has done) will give your customers enough time to make the necessary changes and still be able to communicate effectively.

Customers are being left on their own to re-configure their e-mail clients - could a client software tool not have been provided?

There are so many email clients out there, on so many platforms, that it might be difficult to ensure that client migration could be completed without a tremendous amount of follow-on support.  Google has provided some nice APIs for provisioning and migration, but the burden of building client-based (ie Outlook, Thunderbird, Entourage) migration tools is much larger than dealing with a single vendor API.  

To help deal with these types of client-setup issues, LTech offers a support package for Google Apps migrations.  This is designed to assist both end-users and administrators. In leiu of a dedicated support team like LTech on your project, a well-written set of self-service instructions will give the majority of your users everything they need to make the switch, with your own support folks handling the one-off cases. Again, giving your users enough time to make the switch is key.