Giving up on Google+ for Google Apps

Google Apps and Google+ do not play well together.  Actually, they don’t play together at all.  At least not for now.  Dave Girouard, President of the Enterprise group, has said the search giant will make Google+ available to Apps users, but no timeline has been given.

I’ve been paying to host my domain with an Apps account for several years.  As a small business, and not and enterprise entity, all I really wanted from the Apps account was a personal domain and perhaps a little better support.  Turns out part of the package is having to wait for cool new features like Google+.

Option 1 – Wait on Google Apps

Apparently, the main reason Apps users cannot have Google+ today is the inability to set up a Google Profile.  Way back in March we were promised Profiles in a post on the Enterprise Blog.  As of this writing, that was 103 days ago… and counting.

Option 2 – Switch to a Consumer account

Being prone to impatience, I decided to make the switch.  But for a small business like myself, it’s a little more involved than just setting up a new Gmail account.  Plus I want all this to work on my Droid X.  Here are the steps I figure have to be completed.

• Set up a Consumer account
• Clean up contacts to move to the new account
• Export contacts from Apps and import to Consumer
• Set up the Apps email (and a few other accounts) to be fetched by the Consumer account
• Hard reset my Droid X and enter the Consumer account
• Reinstall all of my Droid apps (and repay for a couple)
• Transfer important calendar events
• Transfer important Docs
• Fake out Voice somehow, since you cannot delete an old account

So far, I’ve cleaned up my contacts and imported them to the Consumer account.  I’ve also started the process of fetching 16,800 emails from the Apps account.  This takes a long time for so many emails.  With attachments, that’s almost 3GB of email.  Best I can tell, it will lake a little over 48 hours to complete.  It’s still running now.  Should be done early tomorrow.

My next step is to reset the Droid, get the Consumer account running there, and finally enjoy Google+ on my mobile device.

I really wish Profiles had been made available for Apps accounts three months ago when it was promised “soon”.  Using Google+ with my existing Apps account would have been FAR easier that all I’m doing to be able to use the service now.

And somehow I just know that the Google+ on Google Apps issue will get resolved just about the time I get comfortable using the Consumer account.  Who knows, maybe as a reward for having to wait Apps accounts will pick up some exclusive features of Google+ when it finally arrives for us.  Hey, I can hope, right?

Will I switch back when Google+ comes to Apps?  Maybe.  I’ll have to wait and see on that one.

In the mean time, let me know if you’re an Apps user and how you’re handling the excruciating wait for this hot new social network to arrive.  I’ll post an update after I have the switch completed and let you know how the journey unfolded.