Going Google - Last Week Sneak Peeks

T-minus one month!

Our District will transition to Google Apps for Education as our primary email system on July 2, 2010. We've notified staff, posted our training and support site, encouraged email back-ups and clean up.

We have also tested user migration, calendar migration, Outlook folders and more. (Don't get me started on sorting email into folders! I just don't understand why anyone would file email 4, 5, and even 6 folders deep!) Am I the only one that doesn't sort their email into folders? Who has that kind of time?

Now we turn our focus to training. The last weeks of school we are setting up in school libraries. We are inviting all staff to introductory sessions using demonstration accounts. We are providing tri-fold brochures that outline the basics of Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts. We call the sessions "Sneak Peek This Week!"

Almost all staff are excited, perhaps nervous, about the change. Once they experience the interface we see staff members are more relaxed. They are confident that they will be able to operate in the new system.

The biggest challenge to date has been the difference between folders and labels as well as "search rather than sort".

One technical challenge that we've recently discovered is that calendar events initiated by the user migrate just fine. Calendar events that are created from an invitation are not being migrated. Fingers crossed that we'll get that ironed out.

Has anyone solved the calendar migration issue?