Google Apps Accounts Migration for Blogger & Checkout

Google has updated their Apps and is forcing all users to Migrate.

Unfortunately not all of their services are ready for this and will not fully migrate automatically.

At the time of this writing the following services fail to transition properly: Analytics / Website Optimizer, Blogger, Google Alerts, Google Base, Google Calendar, Google Checkout, Google Custom Search, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Moderator, Google News, Google Reader, Google Subscribed Links, Google Talk, Groups, iGoogle, Places and Webmaster Tools.

Yea, that’s quite a lot, these 18 products (of roughly 70) are not ready.

Google has mentioned that eventually this will be fixed but has not announced any ETA.

That makes it difficult for anyone, including us and our clients, to plan.

We’ve been forced to figure out work-arounds and here is one for what to do on Blogger.

Migrating Blogger or Checkout with Google Apps

This is a tedious process, where your Blogger or Checkout account is going to have the existing authors switched around.

You will need two Google Apps accounts, in the same domain, to perform these steps.

Is is critical that you do not delete your blog or you will lose the custom domain (like blog.edoceo.com)

  • user% represents the old account with the conflicting name that was migrated to gtempaccount.com
  • user@ represents the new account in the Google Apps domain
  • temp@ represents the account in the Google Apps domain which will be used for an interim Author

There were some transitioning issues when attempting to go from the user% account directly to the user@ account – so we had to use an interim transitioning account – which temp%

E.G. For us user@ would be our old blog@domain.com (user@) account, which got migrated to blog%domain.com@gtempaccount.com (user%).

We had to use the interim account shit@domain.com (temp@) during this migration.

Here are the steps to follow, may the force be with you.

  1. Sign into Blogger using the user% account
  2. Visit Settings » Permissions and select to add a new author
  3. Enter the account for temp@ to become an Author
  4. Sign out of Google as user%, flush cookies and sign-in now as temp@
  5. Follow the link in the invitaion email, connect to Blogger and create your Profile
  6. Sign out of Google as temp@ account and sign-in again as user%
  7. Grant Admin Privileges to this the temp@ user account
  8. Sign out of Google as user% and then sign-in as temp@
  9. Go to Blogger Settings » Permissions again and remove the Author user%
    1. Sign out of all Google stuff and flush cookies
    2. Wait about 20 to 30 minutes for the Google Infrastructure to update, going too fast can make the next step fail.
    3. Did you really wait 30 minutes? Do yourself a favour and execute this step properly
    4. Sign-in as temp@ then add user@ account to your Blogger (Settings » Permissions), this will bring in the Apps account.
    5. Sign-out as temp@ then sign-in as user@ and follow the link in this email.
    6. Sign-out again as temp@ and promote user@ to an administrative level account
    7. Sign-in now as user@ and visit Blogger, you should have full control.
    8. None of the Profile settings from the user% account will be migrated to the user@ account so you will be required to re-create all that.

There is some data migration issue that Google has not resolved yet.

When you start promoting your Google Apps domain to function more like a Google Account (or when Google forces your migration) these steps will be necessary to clean data out of your @gtempaccount.com domain and into your desired domain.

See Also

http://blog.edoceo.com/