After four months of Google+ for Gmail accounts Google finally released Google Plus for Google Apps accounts as well. You can now create a new account based on your Apps domain name, which is really useful if you’re using your primary e-mail from your domain. Until now, you had to create a new Gmail account or use an old one, but which was not used in Google Apps.
Because Google didn’t offer tools to join accounts even the migration from personal to domain account didn’t enable you to use Google Plus. So many users used their secondary account to access Google Plus, where they have created circles, uploaded photos and written posts. Now that they have an option to create a Google Plus account with their first e-mail, will they do it? Will they have to re-add all the people and upload the photos again? Well, this time Google has the answer and it looks like in several weeks they will release a tool that will do this automatically:
With this tool, you won’t have to rebuild your circles, and people who’ve already added you to their circles will automatically be connected to your new profile. We expect this migration option to be ready in a few weeks, so if you’d like, you can go ahead and get started with your Apps account today and merge your connections once the tool is available.
I wonder if the tool will only update connections or will it migrate all the data as well?
To turn on Google Plus for your Google Apps domain account follow these steps:
- Login to your account (“Manage this domain” from Gmail).
- Click “Organization & users” tab.
- Click “Services” sub-tab.
- In the list of services, scroll down to “Google+” and enable it. Note that Picassa will be enabled automatically.
- Go to https://plus.google.com and create your account.
Google+ should be enabled by default for users who have selected to have the newest features, but for my domains I had to turn it on manually.
