Google Apps admins jittery about Gmail hopeful about future Mac Central

When Gmail crashed last Monday affecting many organizations that depend on it for work e mail via the Google Apps suite widespread gnashing of teeth ensued. Related E mail and Internet Articles Google Apps admins jittery about Gmail hopeful about future Review ContentBarrier X Gmail users report yet another outage Google Reader becomes more discreet when sharing CommuniGate adds video mail to Pronto client At Alaska s APTI public TV and radio station reporters working on deadline scrambled to gather information without e mail as a tool. In the middle of an important press announcement staffers at San Francisco Internet startup Kwiry sought alternate ways to stay in touch with contacts. At Davidoff Communications the outage hit less than hours after the Chicago company s migration of its five users to Google Apps. Since we re only on day four of our implementation let s just say if Apps were on my baseball team it would be hitting at the bottom of the lineup said Davidoff Sys! tems Administrator Mitch Wilkos in an e mail interview this week. With its Apps hosted suite of communications and collaboration applications Google is a leading proponent of software as a service SaaS an emerging model of software delivery that backers say represents the future. Because vendors host applications in their own data centers companies don t have to concern themselves with hardware provisioning and software maintenance. By living in the Internet cloud these hosted applications simplify sharing and collaboration among employees. However the experience of users living through the recent Google Apps outages could serve as a deterrent to some IT and business managers who might not be ready to ditch conventional software packages that are installed on their servers. If a company relies on Google Apps for its e mail its IT and business managers have little to do when a Gmail outage hits them and with end users demanding explanations this waiting game can be a very st! ressful situation as John Proffitt IT services director at APTI can attest. For me as the Google Apps administrator the disruption was pretty damn irritating. Aside from getting kicked out of e mail I need to do my own job it also forced me to completely refocus on figuring out what s happening with Gmail and Google Apps he said in an e mail interview. For the two hours that the outage lasted Proffitt estimates that about percent of the organization s approximately employees were affected some severely including the journalists who make up about a quarter of the staff. It was constant troubleshooting testing research posting to the Google Apps forums and so on. Plus there s the emotional strain of wondering whether you completely screwed up by moving everyone to Google Apps as our sole e mail system. That s what freaked me out Did Google just make me look like an idiot Proffitt added. That s not a nice feeling to have especially since Proffitt did his homework and took his time before deciding to move his end users to Google Apps. He used the ! suite for about nine months himself as a guinea pig and then rolled it out to the entire organization six weeks ago. Prior to Monday s crash his satisfaction level with Google Apps was about percent. Now he puts it at percent. Mostly that percent drop is based on fear of another perhaps more damaging outage. It hasn t happened but now I know it could happen any time and without warning and if it does I have virtually no recourse to get the service running again he said. Last Monday s outage was sandwiched between two other Gmail crashes one the week before and another one on Thursday and Friday of last week both of which were smaller in scale. Proffitt wasn t affected by those other outages but he s ready to rethink his status as hosted software adopter if things don t go well in the future. If we began to experience a similar outage more than about two or three business hours per quarter we d probably make Google Apps and Gmail a backup solution to a locally hosted mail sy! stem if we used it at all. And it would likely be years before we d try a cloud based collaborative system again from any vendor Proffitt said. Still Proffitt and other Apps administrators interviewed are hoping that Google will quickly strengthen the reliability of Gmail and the other suite components to a point where crashes become extremely rare. The benefits Apps offers to their small and medium size organizations are significant in terms of cost savings and the flexibility of Web based software. Even though we ve only had Apps for a few days I m already impressed with the customization options. The ability to completely ditch Outlook makes Apps a worthwhile service to our company said Davidoff s Wilkos. The Gmail interface feels more intuitive and is significantly quicker than Outlook. And the mobile accessibility is a huge improvement over our old e mail service. Although Monday s outage stung Kwiry on an important day and the startup was hit briefly again on Thursday CEO Ron Feldman is betting on Google Apps. Google understands its trem! endous responsibility to keep things up and running Feldman said via e mail. Carlos Leyva managing shareholder at Digital Business Law Group is also confident in Google and is sold on the SaaS model which he expects will allow his new law firm to grow quickly without having to spend a fortune on its computing infrastructure. No one s happy when there s downtime but there s always downtime. I ve seen Exchange go down often. Many times you re left to your own IT people to fix it. That can be good or bad. I d rather it be Google s problem. They ve got a world class team. Their reputation is on the line. Over time they re going to get better and better he said in a phone interview. Thomas Harbinson president of IDA International in Derby Connecticut found last Monday s outage a minor disruption for the engineering and construction service company s users. They have been very satisfied with Apps which the company has been using for about a year after migrating away from Exchange! . As a small organization looking at pre Google Apps practice if it had been my hardware in house that went down I would not have had anywhere near the reaction time and response to be restored as Google did with the Apps service Harbinson said via e mail. Tags mail servers office applications Recommend this story NO YES Email Comment Slashdot Digg Del.icio.us Google Apps admins jittery about Gmail hopeful about future Comments Posting comment . Name City Address State Zip Address E mail optional Canadian Residents Foreign Residents Gift Subscriptions Customer Service Privacy Policy Top stories on Macworld Jobs MobileMe not up to Apple s standards What will be in Apple s next laptops Apple s unforgivable DNS delay See all the latest Apple product reviews news and videos New E mail and Internet Reviews ContentBarrier X TubeTV . Firefox . Transmission . IPNetSentryX . . 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Source: http://www.macworld.com/article/135059/2008/08/googleapps.html

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