Testing the waters with GG2

For those who just came out of their caves, Google, our favorite search company started testing revitalized google groups 2 (gg2) weeks ago. And up to today i have been watching and testing the service. In many aspects it is still pretty in its beta stage, and therefore it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a review of the service at this time. Getting a first hand experience of the service would probably serve best those who are curious about the service.

As in the case for most of us, our Yahoo Groups pretty much does everything for our group collaboration needs. I actually see Yahoo's excellent and exhaustive features as the best in the field which google engineers should aim to leapfrog. Parity cannot be enough, if google wants to take a big slice of the cake. The sevice from Google however, should not be underestimated, for it has its own arsenal of features, albeit still in its young stages. The power of the google search, a very good implementation of threaded messages and Atom Feeds for messages summaries, are only a few of these features.

So you have a yahoo groups account, but want to test this new Google groups, What can you do? I would really go against migrating your whole group at this point. It's just too early. What you can do as a starter, is create your group under Google Groups 2 now. I see two reasons for this "beta migration": 1)to reserve your group's name as early as now and 2)to be able to duplicate future posts to your current Yahoo group. The first is obvious, so i'll just dwell on the 2nd reason.

What i mean with the second reason is like this: if you start your google groups now, you can forward all future message posts done in your yahoo groups TO your NEW google group's account. (Take note:FUTURE messages only. so if you start early, the more messages you will have later). This way you will have a Google groups archive of your Yahoo Groups message posts. Should you chose to migrate later, you'd already have a message archive to start, minimizing the barrier to and inconvenience of migration. Normally you can just set your group preferences in Yahoo Group to forward emails to your new Google group email, but for some reasons, Yahoo prevents you from doing this. So you have to find an email forwarding service that will serve as a midle man between your Yahoo and Google group. I tried despammed and bigfoot. I had some problems with despammed because it breaks the message threading feature of GG2, the glitch actually being the effect of the "[DESPAMMED]" string appended by the service to the subject of the messages. Im afraid that spam is the caveat of the bigfoot service, but i have yet to see one.... Lastly, you can always set your own mail server do the forwarding work. After you've done all that, your google groups account will now begin archiving your yahoo groups messages.