Apps Administration

Google Apps accounts are transitioning to a new infrastructure. This change is being made so your Google Apps accounts can start accessing dozens of Google services beyond those currently available to them. After the transition, your users will have access to many new services such as Blogger, Reader, Picasa Web Albums, and iGoogle from their Google Apps accounts. Previously, these Google products were available only in personal Google Accounts. To learn more about what this new infrastructure means for your domain, yourself, and your users, review our What’s changing guide that explains the transition.

You can turn services on and off for certain users by navigating to your administrator control panel and clicking the User and Organizations tab then the Services tab. Note that a service must be turned on in your administrator control panel before a user in your domain may access it.

The additional services outside the core suite of applications are currently not covered by any support or service level agreement. For those services, you'll find assistance through the Google Help Centers and Help forums. We do intend to evaluate possible support options for the added services in the future.

Before and during the transition, disable the Provisioning API to prevent race conditions between the migration tool and the Provisioning API.

Users will no longer be able to access multiple Google accounts in the same browser, like their Google Apps account and personal Google Account, unless they add an optional feature called multiple sign-in. See Using multiple accounts in the Google Accounts Help Center for more information about multiple sign-in or other options that allow you to use multiple accounts simultaneously.

In order for the transition to happen, only one instance of each account name (email address) should exist in the Google Apps account infrastructure. However, a percentage of Google Apps Accounts have conflicting account names as they have the same email address as existing Personal Google Accounts. This happens when users sign up for non-core products - e.g. Blogger, Picasa Web Albums or Reader - with their Google Apps address. Learn more about conflicting accounts.

The conflict in account names needs to be resolved in order for the Google Apps Account to be fully transitioned. Users with conflicting account names will need to rename their Personal Google Account to re-associate the data in the account. View the instructions to rename a conflicting account.

At this time, these options are limited to specific services. Your users can transfer data in some applications from their personal Google Accounts to their Google Apps accounts after the conversion. Users with conflicting accounts can use a data migration tool to transfer data from their conflicting account to their Google Apps account. There are no administrative controls for data transfer at this time. Each user will have to decide what to transfer and initiate the process. Learn more about transferring data in the Google Accounts Help Center.

The minimum password length in the new infrastructure is 8 characters. The administrator control panel and Provisioning API will not allow you to create users with a password shorter than 8 characters or reset a password to a value shorter than 8 characters.

Your users can purchase extra storage for Google Apps accounts. Extra storage for Google Docs, Picasa Web Albums, photos from Blogger, or any combination of these is now available.

Please note:

• If your users have already purchased extra storage in an existing Google Account, the storage will remain in that account and will not transfer to their Google Apps account after the transition.
• Extra storage is not available for Gmail.

If you have users on your domain who use the email delegation feature of Gmail, you will need to make sure that both the delegate's account and primary account are transitioned. The email delegation feature doesn't work if one account has been transitioned and the other has not. Learn more about email delegation.

If your users used Picasa Web Albums with personal Google Accounts, they will not be able to reuse their old Picasa Web Album display usernames. They will have to sign up for new display usernames.