Google+ now available to Google Apps customers, migration coming soon

You’ve waited and you’ve wanted and now it’s finally here. Google Apps accounts are now available to Google+, according to a post on the Google Enterprise blog.

Starting now you can manually turn on Google+ for your organization. Once Google+ is turned on, your users will just need to sign up at google.com/+ to get started. For customers who use Google Apps for Business or the free version of Google Apps and who have chosen to automatically enable new services, Google+ will automatically become available to all of your users over the next several days.

The administrator for your domain will need to enable the features for you, but once that’s done, you can finally access Google+ from your Google Apps domain email. Interestingly, you’ll also have built-in sharing circles for your organization.

There is a very interesting caveat to this, however, which we’ve discussed more in depth in another post — since Google Apps data is owned by your domain manager, that manager will be able to access and delete your data. In short, don’t do anything stupid.

If you’ve already been using Google+ with a personal account, you’ll soon be able to migrate that data over, as well, with an upcoming tool.

“With this tool, you won’t have to rebuild your circles, and people who’ve already added you to their circles will automatically be connected to your new profile. We expect this migration option to be ready in a few weeks”

It’s a much-welcomed tool for Google+ users, or those who want to be, who have Google Apps accounts. As you might remember, TNW had an account on Google+ from day 1, but as promised the account was disabled. Since then, we’ve been in contact with Google+ and TNW’s CEO Zee has been manning the helm from his person account. Now we won’t have to do so any longer.

There are some other great features that have come into play today, as well. Make sure to check out our run-down here to find out what’s new.

What does this mean for your organization? Does it give you the freedom to move away from other services? We’d love your thoughts in the comments.