Google seeks to poach Exchange users

With tool to ease you into the cloud

Google hopes to nibble away at Microsoft's Exchange user base a litte more quickly with  a new tool that simplifies the process migrating to Google Apps.

Free to buyers of Google Apps Premier or Education Editions, the server-side tool works with Exchange 2003/2007 or hosted Microsoft Exchange, the wholly unevil company said.

It enables the bulk transfer of email, contacts and calendar data, but nothing else. Admins can choose to phase migration if they have particularly large user bases.

Previously, a company's best bet for migrating between the two platforms was Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, a Google plug-in that allows individual users to use Google Apps through a familiar Microsoft front-end.

The service is available through Google's Apps page here.

Google claims that 25 million corporate users are now using its Apps, these having made the trade-off between the cost of locally-managed software and the reliability of cloud-hosted services.