You could use iCal or other middleware to sync the sites. No promises as to their convenience or the time it would take. As for the docs, I don’t know how that would work but there’s likely a similar solution.

The bigger issue here that you raise is that with cloud computing it becomes increasingly difficult to OWN your data–when you want to jump-ship, even to the same service, it’s a difficult process. That’s what Google is putting into place right now to keep our eyeballs on their online properties…

At this time I keep things in the cloud for convenience but have numerous methods setup to keep local copies so that when I want to act fast or switch providers, the option exists. Just food for thought as we move toward the convenience of storing things with Google or other providers. When you want to change direction, it’s a much more difficult path than moving a file from one directory to another.

One more thing. I have over 350 docs in my @gmail google docs account plus my gcal is essential and syncs with my mac’s iCal.

Any ideas on migrating those?

I am so googled out!

Moving the email isn’t so bad but I don’t yet know of a way to CHANGE your environment so that you can keep all the filters.

Moving the email, for me, was a matter of downloading it all via IMAP and then re-uploading it–I used ThunderBird as the go-between. It’s a good safety measure to download all your email if you haven’t yet anyways.

As for the chat issue, there really isn’t a great solution, but you could keep both gmail accounts open at the same time with:

http://www.longfocus.com/firefox/gmanager/

Or, you could use another application for chat and get outside of that gmail window. These all should work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jabber_client_software

In the end, is it worth it? So long as you already have all your email backed up and people are emailing you at your domain and not the gmail address, it may not be necessary. But if you want to start down this path, it’s at least possible.

i have been using the “on behalf of gmail.com” version for a while now. would really consider google apps BUT

migrating my mail and settings to the apps version seems like a pain

kind of like pagerank, i lose a lot of gchat buddies who know me as myname@gmail.com

any thoughts