Moving your team over: mail, calendars and contacts
Not everything comes over automatically, and that's worth knowing before cutover day rather than after. Here's what genuinely moves, what you bring over yourself, and what starts clean on purpose.
1. Add your team first
In Users (workspace admins only), create an account for each person before anything else — mail, calendar and contacts all hang off an account existing. Your plan sets the ceiling: adding someone past the seats you've paid for is refused outright, not queued or allowed on credit, so check your seat count in the console first if you're onboarding a whole department at once.
2. Mail: connect the mailbox people already have
groupforce doesn't host mailboxes and there is nothing to import. Each person connects the IMAP/SMTP account they already use, and the mail stays on that provider's server; groupforce keeps a read-only mirror of the folders they subscribe to and sends through their own SMTP. So there is no cutover day for mail: nobody's address changes, no forwarding is needed, and the old history is simply still there.
- Have each person (or an administrator on their behalf) add their mailbox in Mail; the connection settings and what is mirrored are in Mail: connect your mailbox.
- Connect a small team first, live with it for a week, then the rest.
3. Calendar: bring events in with an .ics file
For a one-off move, export your old calendar as .ics and use Import Calendar (.ics) in the Calendar rail. If you would rather keep the old calendar and a groupforce one in step, connect a CalDAV app instead (see Calendar & scheduling).
| Limit | What happens |
|---|---|
| File size / event count | Up to 5 MB and 2,000 events per file — split a larger export in two. |
| An event already here | Matched by its UID and updated — importing the same file twice won't duplicate anything. |
| An event with no start or end | Skipped; the import result tells you how many were added, updated and skipped. |
Export works the same way in reverse: the rail's Export Calendar (.ics) link, for whenever you need a copy out.
4. Contacts: connect with CardDAV
The address book speaks CardDAV, so any CardDAV-capable client, including most phones' built-in contacts app, can pull people in and keep them in step. Give the app your workspace address, https://<workspace>.groupforce.org/, any user name, and a personal access token with the carddav scope as the password; the app finds your address books by itself. Client-by-client steps are in Contacts and address books. Tags and categories carry through the round trip.
What's next
Once your team is in and mail is flowing, the natural next steps are setting up group address books for shared contact lists, and inviting a few people to try work items before rolling it out further.