Tonight I officially kicked off the process of moving to Google Apps for my email, calendar, and also for google docs, which I use quite a bit.

I plan to blog on it more, but for now I will say the process was relatively simple, although moving from a fully configured GMail account to a Google Apps account should be less painful than it is.

The process I used for moving was largely similar to what Scott Hanselman has described on his blog - although I had a few different requirements simply based on how my domain email was wired.

Prior to this, all email to realjenius.com was periodically downloaded by GMail so I could have all of the GMail awesomeness, but still have my domain name. This put a weak link in the chain to GMail however: My own email server.

By moving to Google Apps, I can effectively shut down my email servers at Media Temple, with the added benefit that there isn’t a periodic 10 minute delay to get the latest emails.

I used the LimitNone GXFer product to perform a free migration for my account - it’s arguably better than migrating via POP since it grabs filters and labels along the way (although it didn’t get all of my labels; just those associated with filters), and can also automate the migration of contacts and Google Calendar (although Google Calendar is just done via sharing of the primary calendar; you still have a lot of manual work to do there).

Right now the migration is occuring between the two accounts, albeit at a relatively slow pace. As anyone who has used Gmail for any decent amount of time probably knows, when faced with a lot of emails on a source server, GMail may take its time getting to all of the emails.

One other tip of note I would bring up for anyone running services on a domain currently - be sure to turn off any old email accounts at your web host after you move that your web apps may be sending notifications to (contact forms, comment approval emails, etc)… otherwise software on your server (such as PHP apps) will not be able to send notification emails away from your server, as the server will believe it is for a local inbox (and the email will go to your old inbox).