Staff turnover. It’s a fact of business life. It’s not a question of if your business has staff turnover, but how frequently (and why!).
What to do the with the Google Apps accounts of a staff member who’s left your company? Broadly there are 2 options:
- Do nothing. Keeping paying the relatively modest monthly or annual fees to keep the account going, even though it’s not being actively used. Of course you’ll want to do good housekeeping tasks such as changing the password, creating an auto-responder that says “Bob no longer works for us”, and perhaps enabling the feature to allow one or more staff members to easily login to Bob’s account should they need to reference it.
- Terminate the account completely so that you’re no longer paying for it. But before you do you’ll probably want to do one or both of the following:
- Completely backup the Google account.
- Migrate (copy/merge) the account into another existing Google Apps account. Let’s say that Sally, an existing staff member, is taking over Bob’s role. Therefore you may wish to copy all of the data (gmail, calendar, docs, drive) into Sally’s account so that she has quick and easy reference to the entire digital history of Bob’s Google Apps account with your company, i.e. within her own Google Apps account.
Important note: think about confidentiality issues before merging an ex-employees account into a new or existing employee account. You might have discussed pay and conditions issues with Bob, or perhaps some personal or performance challenges. You probably don’t want to share this with another employee who might stumble upon this stuff by accident, i.e. without really trying.
At time of writing (Sept 2013), Google’s tools for achieving option #2 above are relatively, er, unconvincing. Not to worry! Where there’s a business needs, private enterprise tends to move quickly. This is where www.backupify.com comes in, and their “feeder” sites www.snapshottool.com and www.migrationapp.com . Backupify appears to be going hard to offer and improve the best tools for your Google Apps backup and migration (and related) needs. In the year or so since we first spotted it, it’s come on in leaps and bounds.
Of course things change quickly in the cloud, so Google might up their game any second, or they might buy out Backupify, or another company might leapfrog Backupify. But for now, Backupify appears to be the best tool around. Know a better one? We’re all ears!
If your company has a Google Apps account with Itomic and you’d like to review your backup, archive, and migration/merge options, give us a call. You’re welcome to “DIY” with Backupify or similar, or ask us to do it for you.