Ok, I thought I would bite the bullet and transfer to Google Apps.  It’s going to take a while, so I had planned to do little pieces at a time.  Unfortunately Google don’t make it as easy as it should be.

Firstly, I’ve been trying to move my contacts over to Google Apps from Google Mail.  There is a built in export/import feature which works great.  However, contacts are not exported/imported with pictures.  This is annoying, very annoying.  Ok, just save the pictures from the Google Mail account somewhere and attach them to the contacts in Google Apps.  Nope, not possible, you can only change or delete existing contact photos, no way of getting them saved.  Rubbish.  Google Mail has built in groups too called Friends, Family and Colleagues.  These don’t get ported, despite my having assigned contacts to them.  Rubbish.

Ok, I was willing to sacrifice the groups and re-apply the photos manually, that’s not too problematic, though it will take up a lot of time.  Moving on to calendars….  Again there is an export/import feature which leverages the ICS format to do its magic and seems to get things done, although Google tells me 244 out of 259 events were imported.  No clue as to what happened to the 15 it had a problem with, or why.  Again, I thought I’d skip past that, I’m sure they weren’t important.  I need to setup sharing so that Mrs Tom can see what I’m up to, so I added her account in as able to share.  Boom, there it is, except, what’s that?  She can only see my free/busy information.  That sucks massively – when we both use separate GMail accounts this works perfectly.  The long and the short of it is I think I’ll have to stick to using Google Mail for my contacts and calendar, because Google Apps is both a pain in the arse to migrate to, and doesn’t give me quite what I need.

Rubbish.