At some point in your Google existence, you might have to make a decision that might not make a lot of sense. They’ll ask what you want to do about your “Google Personal Account” and your “Google Organizational Account.” It’s not that straightforward.
Google Personal Account
The Google Personal Account usually stems from a Gmail account. Technically, you can have a Google Account and use another email address (as far as I know, this all gets a little cloudy at some point even to someone who lives in Googleland). Along with your Gmail account, you might use other Google services such as YouTube, Blogger, Google Calendar, etc. You use this email address to log into these accounts and this is your Google Personal Account.
Google Organizational Account
The Google Organizational Account is a more recent phenomenon that starts with a Google Apps account. Google Apps can host a variety of services (that are still Google services) but the nice part about it is that you can use your own domain ([email protected]) to log in. Basically, Google is hosting your email and lets you use all of their services with your “own” email address and own domain.
Choosing One or the Other
At some point, Google will ask you to choose one or the other if you had a personal account and somehow also have an organizational account. In my opinion, the choice depends on how you’d like to use Google. If you have or would like to have the organizational set up, choose that. If you just want Google services, but don’t necessarily want Google to host your email, choose personal.
IMHO, they don’t make it too easy to figure out what you’re doing when you choose one or the other. You get a screen that ideally shows services that you have with each service and you can transfer some of them to the one account you’d like to keep. Some services aren’t transferrable, it seems.
Hopefully that gives an overview of what to do in this situation. It’s a little tricky and not terribly clear what to do. At Likoma, we use Google Apps so choose the organizational option to take advantage of using a non-Gmail address for all of the services.
Bradley,
Just stumbled onto your blog and posts. I like!
So, I want to keep BOTH personal and organizational google accounts! What are the odds that is possible? What kind of time line might one expect on when Google will ask to choose?
Thanks,
Gary
Do you mean different email addresses? [email protected] (personal) and then also [email protected]? If that’s what you mean, that’s certainly possible. I do the same thing. You can even be logged into both and switch accounts (relatively new feature).
hi Bradley, I am stuck with this issue too… you are right that Google does not make it clear.
I get a conflicting accounts message when I log in, I use [email protected] (managed by Google’s Gmail) and they want me to move to a temporary account…
but I want to keep this personal account as so many services and subscriptions are linked to it, and I feel the dates are numbered…
So I am wondering and tried but without luck to change the organisational account to another [email protected]?
Hi Toni,
I feel your pain!
I think the personal and the organizational about separate domains so that you couldn’t [email protected] and [email protected] be different Personal or Organizational accounts.
But who knows, it’s so confusing! I hope that helps.
Hi Bradley,
I haven’t yet migrated, but I am wondering what it means if I start the migration… The main important point to me is, can I keep my email messages in my “organisational account” (say [email protected]) and move the other stuff to another email [email protected]?
So basically, I want to keep this organisational account for the email use after the migration. Do you think that is possible?
Hi Toni, I feel like an attorney here (which I’m not), but I don’t want to give you advice here that might lose you emails (or accounts or settings or whatever). I haven’t done what you’re doing in quite a while, so I just also can’t remember exactly how it’s all done and maybe since then things have changed or improved (hopefully!), but I don’t know.
So I wonder, do you have at least one Business Account with Google? The one that costs $50/year? I ask because then I think the advantage is that you get a number where you can talk to a real person and get some help. I think at this point for you, I would recommend talking to someone at Google to help prevent losing anything you don’t want to lose!
Sound like a plan? I wish I had more concrete advice for you.
Dear Likoma! I am just contact you please how can you help me to create a gmail account for an organization?
Great..