Google Apps and Accounts

Google announced to its Apps users a while ago that they will be transitioning all Apps accounts to a new infrastructure that will allow users on Google Apps domains to make use of more of the services that regular Google Accounts can access (like those tied to a gmail.com email address). We’ve started the transition of a few of our own Google Apps accounts to the new format. There are a few things to be aware of.

Some of our users had associated their work email addresses, the email addresses that are all using Google Apps, with a Google Account in order to access certain services like Checkout or Adsense and Adwords. This association is available to any email address regardless of what email system it’s tied to. This way, someone who uses services like Yahoo or their own Microsoft Exchange server can have access to Google’s products. The system treated Google Apps email addresses in the same way as any other.

But now with the transition, those Google Accounts that are tied to an Apps email address need to be dealt with. The only way to successfully transition an Apps email address into a full Google Account for now is to make sure there isn’t an Account already tied to that email address. So what does this really mean? It means the Account currently tied to the Apps email address has to go away - it has to be assigned to a different non-Apps email address, like a new Gmail account or any other non-Apps email address that hasn’t been associated with a Google Account.

Google is working out some infrastructure changes so when they automatically transition accounts in early 2011, you won’t need to reassign those existing Accounts to a different email address. But if you don’t have users who have created Google Accounts tied to their email addresses, then you can start the transition now from the Apps Control Panel.

This transition opens up some very exciting options for businesses. Stay tuned. I, for one, am very excited about this for our company.