AAPT deploys Gmail for corporate email

AAPT has migrated its 1200 users from Outlook to Google's Gmail.

The telco's chief operations officer David Yuile (pictured) told iTnews the switch was completed yesterday following a two-month trial involving 250 users.

"We migrated all the mail [to Gmail] over the weekend," Yuile said.

Users' mailbox capacities increased from 200 MB to 25 GB, resulting in many uploading years of email archives to Gmail overnight.

And they now have access to the Google Talk instant-messaging application and had already started "point-to-point video chats" and collaborating using the new tools, Yuile said.

Yuile said AAPT had bought more features from Google that enabled 10 years of archives for emails and threads: trails of conversations.

"As a corporate, we felt that was appropriate," he said.

Yuile said that AAPT would switch off its part of a Microsoft Exchange outsourced contract provided to the Telecom NZ group by EDS (now HP Enterprise Services).

"We're shutting down our mailboxes and moving them off [that service]."

The trial informed AAPT of the questions users would ask and how they reacted to the migration.

Although there were "one or two things people miss [in Outlook]... I think within a week they'll have forgotten" as they got used to Gmail and started using the new capabilities of the system, he said.

The move to Gmail is phase two of AAPT's migration to Google's cloud, or hosted, services.

It deployed Google Video and Google Sites late last year.

"I'm really pleased we did this," Yuile said of the Gmail migration.

"I'm excited about what people will do with this now."