Google recently hung a ‘going out of business’ sign on its Message Continuity service for users of Microsoft Exchange. Google will continue to provide the service to its users until their contracts run out, but after that, they’re on their own.

Since the service was launched a little over a year ago, “hundreds” of businesses have subscribed to the offering, which uses Google’s cloud to provide email continuity when a Microsoft Exchange environment is interrupted for any reason.

Hundreds of users, though, can’t compete with the “millions” of businesses that have moved their entire email operation to Google Apps, so Searchzilla has decided to scrap its continuity product for Exchange  and concentrate all its resources on its application suite. Continue reading Google Deserts Exchange Users by Killing Message Continuity

Estimates show Twitter to have over 300 million users. Facebook is close to 1 billion and Google+ keeps growing every day.

Add to the mix all of the smaller, niche social networks and those numbers continue to climb.

Take into account that all of these platforms offer some type of messaging client you can see why some people can so confidently make the claim that email is dead.

But despite the popularity of instant messaging through social networks, text messages and Tweets, email remains a powerful force. Powerful enough that VisibleGains, a video marketing company, confidently makes the claim that email is here to stay in a recent infographic that they created. Continue reading Should We Say Goodbye To Email?

Back in October of 2009 the City of Los Angeles voted unanimously to outsource their email services to Google. While many other organizations have made similar moves, this move made Los Angeles the largest city in the United States to hand over its messaging services to Google, Inc.

For $7.2 million, all 30,000 city employees would be turning to the cloud for email.

This was a huge win for Google because not only did they beat out their rival, Microsoft, but a successful implementation would easily pave the way for future business with local governments. Continue reading For Los Angeles, Not Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining

It seems like everywhere you go the topic of Google+ vs. Facebook hits you smack in the face. No pun intended.

Much of this debate stems from the reliance of so many people using social tools as their primary method of communication and content curation. Continue reading Email is Still Most Popular

Exchange administrators are probably quite familiar with management pressure or subtle ‘suggestions’ to migrate for a cloud-based email service, typically epitomized in the form of Google Apps.  As someone who believes in utilizing the best tool for the job, I am of the opinion that there are businesses and organizations that will certainly benefit from shifting to a cloud-hosted email service.  However, some companies might be opting for Google Apps due to what they hear about its supposed reliability and affordability, but neglecting to perform a factual evaluation.

While some might argue that a comparison of Microsoft Exchange with Google Apps is like trying to compare apples to oranges, there are fundamental similarities in an email service that we can use as a benchmark.

Continue reading Comparing Microsoft Exchange with Google Apps for Email

A flawed storage software update over at Google triggered an unexpected bug over the weekend.  This resulted in data corruption that affected tens of thousands of Gmail accounts, with some users missing old messages or finding their account emptied of all emails, while others have been left unable to log into their mailboxes.

Google was quick to point out that affected users account for a mere 0.02% of its user base even as it launched into the task of restoring affected accounts. At the time of writing this article however, the problems with Gmail have been persisting for some users into the fourth day with no definite timeframe for a final resolution.

Confident of its cloud architecture and sophisticated software systems, Google has recent modified its SLA (Service Level Agreement) to remove provision for planned downtime.  Beyond being an obvious slap in the face for one of the largest email providers in the world, what are some lessons that email administrators can learn from this debacle?

Continue reading The Big Gmail Crash and the Lesson for Email Administrators

Google two weeks ago announced that it has changed its SLA (Service Level Agreement) for paid versions of its Google Apps suite of products, removing provisions for planned downtime.  The goal, says Google Enterprise product management director Matt Glotzbach, is to deliver service that’s as reliable as telephone dial tone.

Understandably some observers see this as a war of “nines,” since the move pits the strengths of its cloud-based architecture against conventional on-premise deployments.  Detractors might also argue that Google hasn’t always been completely honest where its definition of uptime is concerned, since outages lasting below 10 minutes were simply ignored in the past.  Of course, the recent changes in Google’ SLA now counts intermittent downtime towards the total used to determine the credit customers are entitled to.

Regardless, email administrators are probably left a little worried, understandable since Google’s self-sufficient Gmail email service is part of Google Apps, and which relegates the administrator to simple tasks such as creating user accounts and assigning passwords.  While I’ve previously written about Some Reasons for an On-Premise Deployment of Exchange Server, I wanted to specifically write about why Microsoft Exchange is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

Continue reading Why Email Administrators need not worry about Google’s new SLA

Downtime in minutes in major email programs.

Google would like to replace Exchange as the primary email platform in corporate America but, as the song goes, you can’t always get what you want. So the search giant has adopted a backdoor approach to grabbing business from Exchange users. It has launched a service aimed at those users that offers to backup their email to Google’s cloud.

The service, Google Message Continuity, will back up Exchange mailboxes for an annual fee of $25 per user. Only Exchange 2003 and 2007 are supported now, but a version for Exchange 2010 is in the wings.

Google Message Continuity works like this.

Accounts on an Exchange server–including email, calendar and contacts–are mirrored on Google’s Gmail servers. If the Exchange server’s operation is interrupted for any reason–a breakdown, for instance, or scheduled maintenance–users can log on to Gmail, using their Exchange username and password, and continue to send and receive email. Since both systems will be synchronized, users can switch between the two without a hiccup.

Continue reading Google offers backup service for Exchange

The release of Google Buzz adds another new step in the ongoing evolution of online communication.  And I hope you’ve been paying attention to the evolution so far.

Buzz, along with Google’s other recent release Google Wave, add real-time communication to traditional email inboxes in ways that, quite frankly, most people will fail to grasp for some time yet.

These new Google releases are part of a long running change in the consumer side of online communications.  Looking back 10 years the average web user had email, newsgroups, and basic instant messaging, all performed on their computers.

Today we have blended platforms such as Facebook that include email-style messaging, real time chat, and broadcast communications such as status updates.  In addition to this more and more content is shared in non-text formats.  Photos and videos are exchanged between friends as often as written messages are.  Business deals are done on Twitter.  And no one ever complained that a sales pitch was too short.

Business communications are charting a similar, but slower evolution.  Email quickly replaced much of our phone and fax communications and became a collaborative workspace, albeit a highly inefficient one.

In recent years collaboration has moved out of the inbox and into document management systems and intranet workspaces.  Faxes go directly to electronic records management systems instead of being dropped on our desk.  And telephony systems are integrating with our real-time communications servers to make voicemail and presence data available to us at our desks or on our mobile devices. Continue reading What Will Email Be In 10 Years?

The City of Los Angeles has proposed using Google Apps for messaging and collaboration. Naturally, the bean-counters in the city office are all agog about the prospect of saving some money, which, during the recession, has taken front row at city council meetings all across the country. Not to put too fine a point on it, cities are going broke, and having to cut back wherever they can–and in some cases, where they shouldn’t.

Fortunately, there are a few dissenting voices in the crowd. Using Google for email may well have its place, but that place isn’t in organizations that are required to provide any degree of security and privacy. The World Privacy Forum expressed some legitimate concerns that transferring city records to a cloud-based provider could violate privacy rights, and possibly even state or federal laws.

Continue reading LA proposes using Google Apps, security worries abound