* As of September 2016, Google Apps has been re-branded to G Suite
Here at Ballyhoo we use Google Apps for all our email and task scheduling. It’s a great way for us to stay on top of things when away from the office so we never miss an email or appointment. However, as you may have already read, we recently incorporated as Ballyhoo Ltd and therefore wanted to switch from using our original domain (ballyhoocommerce.co.uk) to our new primary domain (ballyhoo.ltd.uk) for use with our Google Apps.
So essentially we set up a new account with Google and needed to transfer our contacts, mail and calendar events from our old account to the new account. Even with the help of the Google Help pages, this wasn’t straightforward. Below is the final procedure we followed as we feel it may well help someone else in the same situation, particularly our solution for migrating calendar entries which we’ve not seen used before.
Migrating Google Contacts
This was probably the most straightforward part of the migration process. You can easily export your contacts as a CSV file (see Exporting Gmail contacts for details) and then import them into your new account (see Importing CSV files for details).
Migrating Google Mail
Migrating email was fairly smooth too. Google has a nice email migration tool which can be found under advanced tools when managing the domain. There’s a detailed explanation of the process in Google Help. It looks a little daunting, but is essentially simple enough. Simply enter the connection details for your old account in the migration tool in your new account and sit back while Google fetches all your mail for you. This can take quite some time if you have a large number of emails to transfer, and we ended up with some duplicated labels in our new email accounts, but these were easily deleted.
Migrating Google Calendar Events
Now here is where things got tricky. There are numerous blogs and help articles detailing how you can export your Google Calendar in ICAL format to be imported into your new account. Firstly, some don’t mention that you need to ensure you set your calendar to be publicly viewable for this to work, but even then I could only export the times and dates of events without any event information. So I came up with another solution.
There is a great tool available called G Suite Sync (click for more information and to download) which allows you to synchronize your Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook. Here’s how to use this to migrate your calendar events:
- Install G Suite Sync on a PC with Outlook already installed.
- Follow the instructions at Getting started with Google Calendar Sync, configuring the tool to connect to your old Google account and using a 1-way sync from Google Calendar to Microsoft Outlook.
- Allow this process to complete and you will have all of your Google Calendar events copied to your PC.
- Right click on the tool in your task-bar and click options to re-configure the tool.
- Now set up the tool to connect to your new Google account, this time with a 1-way sync from Microsoft Outlook to Google Calendar.
- Allow this process to complete and there you have it, all of your events migrated from one Google account to another.
