General Consultant Discussion

Has anyone here experience with switching their domain email over to gmail? Any tips, gotchas, etc? Is there any period where the email becomes unavailable in the switch?

Yes, I did that and had no issues and no outages. I use Google Domains (google.com/domains) though other hosts like Hover have been good as well. Google explains the setup pretty clearly. I always time this either for a weekend or end of day just in case. If you need any info on the domain setup let me know - as I recall it was very straightforward and I just copied their instructions from Google Apps (which they may now call Google For Work or somesuch). I also configured my domain so mail.s-consult.com would automatically point me to my email inbox.

+1 to Wayne's comments. We did the same thing years ago, I forget most of the details but we also experienced no downtime or outages.

What are you using to share contacts with everyone in the company? Seems strange to me that this is not a Google feature but requires third party software...

In my experience, the contacts portion of Google Apps is exceptionally weak. I also find that most add-ons/extensions for Google look good initially but over time tend to get in the way. One downside to the extensions is to use them you need to be online using the Web UI.

@WayneSchulz - so your recommendation for 3 people would be to each import from the same csv to start and then maintain separately from then on? I do need them to be available in Thunderbird, not just in the web page.

Yes, you can import from CSV provided you don't want to keep them centrally updated. If you want true contact sharing I believe you have to look at one of the third-party solutions in the Google Apps Market.