Multiple Sign-in Coming for Google Apps Users

Google has finally made the formal announcement about the multiple-account sign-in support. Earlier this week, Google started enabling people to sign into more than one Google account at the same time in the same browser. The feature has been rolled-out to everyone, so Google posted an official announcement on its Gmail Blog.

There’s not much new info, the help page describing the feature had already been available and does a good job at describing it, but Google did explain the situation for Google Apps accounts.

“Historically, Google Accounts – including Gmail accounts — have only let people access one account at a time per browser, so using both accounts has been a bit inconvenient. I’ve either had to sign out and sign back in, use a second browser for my second account, or use a Chrome incognito window,” Macduff Hughes, Engineering Director at Google, explains.

“Now, you can visit google.com/accounts and click the link next to ‘Multiple sign-in.’ After you sign into your first account, you can sign in with up to two additional accounts from the new accounts menu in the upper right hand corner of Gmail, then easily toggle back and forth between them,” he announced.

You can be logged into three accounts at any given point and the first one you use will be your ‘default,’ meaning that it will be used for products for which multiple accounts hasn’t been enabled yet. There are some caveats, offline mode in Gmail or Calendar doesn’t work yet, but Google says it’s working on it. As noted, it doesn’t work for all products, just Gmail, Reader, Calendar, Code and Sites for now.

Google Apps users don’t get this option yet. You can already use both your Google Apps and your regular account at the same time, since the products are accessible from different domains. When Google starts enabling Google Apps users to log into regular products with their credentials, the multiple sign-in feature will be available to them as well.