The Transition from MobileMe to GoogleApps was Dead Simple

Remember when I said I was through with MobileMe?  My subscription has officially expired and, shortly before, I packed up and moved back to Google.  The process took less than an hour and the steps were brain-dead simple.

Obviously, the most important transition was moving my emails from my @me.com account to my @gmail.com account.  Throughout my MobileMe subscription, I had my Gmail fetching my university email and forwarding all emails from Gmail to my MobileMe account.   Disabling this was a matter of changing one Gmail setting.  Once a MobileMe subscription ends, you’ve got 15 days during which you can still receive emails, giving you a chance to notify remaining contacts of your address change.  I’ve left my MobileMe account still on my desktop Mail.app to catch anyone that slipped through during my first notification round.  The Mail.app has automatic Gmail syncing which only requires your Gmail username and password.

Calendars were a bit tricky.  I’ve got three separate calendars that were kept in sync with MobileMe and iCal.  Once the MobileMe subscription ended, I could no longer change calendar events on one device and push them over to others.  Instead, I exported each calendar from iCal and uploaded them to Google Calendar.  Within Google Calendar there’s one default calendar that cannot be deleted, so now I’ve got four calendars though I only use three.  Once the final product was imported to Google, I setup iCal to sync with Google Calendar so any changes made would be pushed down to the desktop calendar client.  As with Mail.app, there’s automatic Google Calendar syncing in the iCal preferences.

Since MobileMe wasn’t willing to sync my contacts to the cloud, I moved them to the AddressBook.app through iTunes syncing. Since Google is only capable of importing contacts in a CVS format, I had to download an extra application called AddressBook2CVS.  Once installed, there are two steps that take about 30 seconds to complete.  This was by far the easiest and fastest move of them all.

Once all three pieces had been imported to Google, I setup push Gmail on iPhone via Active Exchange.  Following the guide provided for Google Sync, everything was immediately pushed to my iPhone as if nothing had changed. Changes on any of my devices push to the rest, keeping everything consistent.  Everything works as well, if not better, than MobileMe.  If you’re willing to forgo iDisk storage, web hosting, and Find My iPhone, Google’s waiting for you.  You can’t beat free, especially when it works!  Perhaps a major walkthrough is in order…