Majority of people who use Google services like GMail, tend to have Multiple accounts on the service to make it easy to keep personal and professional correspondence separate. It just good sense to keep them separate.
If you are one of the people who have multiple accounts with Google – you may have experienced the inconvenience of signing out of one account to check others.
Google now provides a solution for this – Multi Account Sign in.
Enable Google Multi Sign-In Feature:
Google Multi Sign-In feature helps you sign into multiple accounts at the same time. You can easily switch from one account to other in a single click. No more signing out of one account and signing into another account just to check the email, check Google Reader updates or make changes in the Calendar.
To enable this feature on your account, click on “settings” on the top right corner of your Window when you are signed into one of Google accounts and then click on “Account Settings”.
You can also click on this link, to go directly to the settings page.
Look at the last option under the “Personal Settings” sections. If you access it for the first time, you would see its “Off”. Click on the edit link to get started with this option.
When you click on Edit – Google would direct you to the page which gives you the details about this feature. This is an experimental feature – so it has certain limitation.
Google Multi Sign-In Features:
1) Google Multi Sign-in feature is currently limited to following Google services: Google Calendar, Code, Calendar, GMail and Sites. More services might be added at a later time.
2) Other Google services not mentioned in the list above, when accessed, would default back to the first account with which you signed in.
3) Offline Mail and Offline Calendar would be switched off when you switch this feature on, so if you absolutely need offline access, you may not want to use this feature.
4) Enabling multiple sign-in for your accounts may cause some of the gadgets you’re using with Google products to stop working properly.
5) Signing In with a new account for the first time will enable the multiple sign-in option for that account as well, Google displays a warning page with an option to opt out before doing so.
6) When you sign in to a secondary account, that account will also be set for multiple sign-in automatically (though Google does pop up a warning page noting this fact before doing so).
Before you get started with this feature, I would suggest signing out of all the Google accounts and then start with your Primary account so that services not included default to main account.
Once you sign into multiple Google accounts, you would see a drop down on top right corner of your browser window to switch between accounts or sign into a different account.
Conclusion:
This is an extremely useful feature which would be appreciated by guys who need to access multiple Google account throughout the day. Access to more services via Multi Sign-in would be welcome. However, if you are not satisfied with the features provided by this feature – there are a few other ways for using multiple accounts. You can read about it in Google help Section here.
Update:
1) Google has enabled Multi Sign-in for Google Voice.
2) Maximum number of accounts that can be signed into is restricted at 3.
