Many businesses use shared mailboxes, public folders and discussion databases that, over the years, accumulate a lot of institutional knowledge. Most cloud-based email services don’t offer this feature, though, making it hard for some companies to move away from their legacy systems. But Google’s new Google Apps Groups Migration API now allows developers to create tools to move shared emails from any data source to their internal Google Groups discussion archives.
Setting up this migration process is likely a bit too involved for a small business without in-house developers, but it is very flexible and, as Google notes, “provides a simple and easy way to ‘tag’ the migrated emails into manageable groups that can be easily accessed by users with group membership.”
The Migration API is limited to 10 queries per second per account and half a million API request per day. The maximum size of a single email, including attachments, is 16MB.
This new API is mostly a complement to the existing Google Apps Provisioning API, which helps businesses create, retrieve and update their users’ accounts on the service, as well as the Google Apps Groups Settings API. The Provisioning API also includes a number of methods to work with Google Groups, but doesn’t currently feature any tools for migrating existing emails and accounts to the service.