Google’s Contact Migration tool enables easy contact importing for Apps admins

Google is making it easier for businesses to switch to its Apps for Business productivity suite from Microsoft’s Exchange and Office 365 services. The company today added a new migration tool to the Apps admin console that makes bringing over employees’ contacts as easy as filling out a form, according to its blog post.

The new tool, called Contact Migration, can migrate contacts over for users who have new Apps accounts so they don’t have to tediously re-type them all in, and for administrators there are no special tools required. Previously admins had to download and install Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange and install it on their servers. Contact Migration only needs some basic information about the server data its being migrated from including admin credentials and the service/version number (for Microsoft Exchange, only 2007 and above is supported).

The company hopes that this tool will greatly simplify the transfer process for administrators, making the switch to Google Apps for Business a slightly easier sell.

Google last year introduced a similar product for importing actual emails from other services, but in that case data could be transferred over from both Microsoft and IMAP products. Google has a help center page up with all the information admins need to transfer over emails and contacts.