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Tuesday night we successfully migrated our school users from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps Education Edition. By the grace of God and the hard work of two volunteers, David Armanious and Samer Salama, the migration went smoothly. We used the new IMAP migration tool that Google provides on premium accounts (educational institutions and non-profits get premium accounts for free) to move all the email over and then manually imported the contacts and calendar from Outlook for the administrative staff. Over the past two days all the staff and teachers have come in and confirmed that everything is working ok. So far we have gotten mainly positive reviews of Google Apps. I’ll try and post in depth details on the migration soon.

A lot of my friends keep asking when I am going to break down and get the iPhone, I tell them that while it truly is an innovative device, it just doesn’t cut it for me. In addition to a a great web browsing experience, there are a few features that the I would like to see in my next phone. We will have to wait and see if the second generation iPhone or the rumored Gphone is released with any of these features…

• 3G Internet – I surf the web a lot from my phone (I have EVDO now)
• Full support for Exchange ActiveSync or something equivalent – I could live with Google syncing calendar, contacts and email back to Google Apps.
• Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) – allows seamless call roaming and handover between your wifi network and the carrier network. T-Mobile’s HotSpot@Home is an example of UMA.
• Going along with UMA, standard SIP client support would be great, allowing for VoIP calls across WiFi or the 3G network. VoIP would not only save money, but allow for direct connectivty with the VoIP based office phones systems.

We are seriously considering moving Little Flock Christian School from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps Education Edition this summer. I applied for the Education Edition a few weeks ago and received approval last week. I started to look at what the migration would involve and found that they still had not released a migration tool for moving from Microsoft Exchange.

Today, I got an email from Google Apps announcing the release of new features, including the email migration tool. Google Premier and Education editions now have access to a migration tool that allows admins to transfer all their users’ email data from an IMAP server (including Microsoft Exchange) to Google Apps.

They also added a shared address book, multi-person chat, slideshow viewer, increased attachment size, calendar gallery and gadget search.

For more details check out the New Features for Google Apps page.