Exchange Server Pro » Google

Google Discontinues Message Continuity

Paul Cunningham — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:29:55 +0000

Google has announced that they are discontinuing Google Message Continuity.

Google Message Continuity (Source: http://www.google.com/postini/continuity.html)

Originally launched as a disaster recovery and business continuity solution for Microsoft Exchange customers it received a lukewarm reception from Exchange admins, and according to a Google blog post did not see significant uptake.

In December 2010 we launched an email disaster recovery product for enterprise customers that use Google’s cloud to back up emails originally sent or received in an on-premise, Microsoft Exchange system. In the time since we launched, we’ve seen hundreds of businesses sign up for it. By comparison, in that same time, we’ve seen millions of businesses move entirely to the cloud with Google Apps, benefitting from disaster recovery capabilities built directly into Apps. Going forward we’ve decided to focus our efforts on Google Apps and end support for GMC.

Google Message Continuity Now Supports Exchange Server 2010

Paul Cunningham — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 11:29:38 +0000

In December 2010 Google launched Google Message Continuity for Exchange Server. This service provides synchronization of Exchange Server data into the cloud to allow email to continue operations if a disaster occurs.

Google Message Continuity (Source: http://www.google.com/postini/continuity.html)

At the time of launch Google Message Continuity only supported Exchange 2003 and 2007. Today Google has announced that Google Message Continuity also supports Exchange Server 2010.

At face value I consider Google Message Continuity to be a decent offering for a limited group of customers who can’t or won’t implement an Exchange-based off-site DR capability. However I am not convinced of the accuracy of the statistics that Google uses when they are promoting the merits of the service.

Recent research conducted by the Radicati Group suggests that users of Microsoft Exchange® face on average over five hours of downtime a month, which is a combination of both unplanned outages and regularly scheduled downtime.

I’m sure I’m not the only Exchange specialist who would love to meet some of these customers who are experiencing five hours of downtime a month (or more, considering that is an average) and help them out with what is clearly a serious problem.

Microsoft also shared their thoughts on Google’s claims. You can read more about that here.

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Microsoft Responds to Google Message Continuity Launch

Paul Cunningham — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:00:17 +0000

A week after Google’s launch of Google Message Continuity Microsoft has responded on two of their company blogs.

Microsoft’s criticism of Google Message Continuity addresses three main points:

Ease of use for end users
Ease of deployment for IT administrators
Support and SLA

In a post on the Unfied Communications Group Team Blog, Julia White writes:

The most important factor is ease of use for end users. In any availability solution to such a critical application as email, the transition process should be seamless. In Exchange 2010, users won’t even know they are accessing a different database. Outlook users can be switched to a backup database when necessary without interruption or notification, and they can continue working in Outlook without switching mailboxes.

This is in contrast to how the Google service delivers email continuity.

Google takes a different approach, which requires a separate Gmail account to access backed up email. This introduces a very different user experience and doesn’t support features like Outlook folders. Additionally, Google requires a different password provided by the Exchange administrator. In the event of a failure, the user will need to switch from Outlook to a new Gmail account and log in with the new password. In looking at the three options, Google’s introduces the most user disruption.

Not just the most user disruption but possibly more IT disruption as well, as Steve Goodman points out:

Disaster strikes, and you have one more problem – a user training issue with a new email system that works in a different way.

Julia White also points out:

The second important factor is ease of deployment and management. In Exchange 2010, Microsoft has made changes in the Exchange architecture that make it much easier to manage a high availability environment, without the deep knowledge of clustering that was previously required. High availability deployment and management tools are built right into Exchange 2010 and there isn’t a need for additional availability solutions. Additionally, Exchange Online provides high availability as a built in part of the service.

Again Google takes a different approach to this with a Google Sync Server required to maintain synchronization between the two email environments, adding more complexity for IT administrators and a new point of failure. In addition to this, Google Message Continuity requires the use of Google’s Postini service, which may be a problem for customers already invested in another email security product.

The final point of concern is with support and SLAs. Here Microsoft urges customers to look closely at Google’s SLA for Google Apps.

(The Google Apps SLA is) not financially backed and allows for 10 minutes of downtime before they start counting. So, the continuity service you pay for could be down more than the Exchange Server you are backing up with the service. . . without anything you can do about it since it’s part of their “SLA”!

The level of support is also questioned. Consider that your organization is already likely to be in a disaster situation if end users are actually using Google Apps for email. In addition to the end user confusion and support that your IT team must deal with, you’re also now in a reduced support mode for a service that is critical to your business (presumably since you’ve invested in email continuity to begin with).

Take this fact: Google offers phone support on weekends and holidays only for “P1″ (Critical Impact – Service Unusable in Production) requests, and only if more than half of users are affected. Google does not respond on weekends or holidays for “P2″ (High Impact – Service Use Severely Impaired) and lower-priority requests. Try explaining to your boss that his/her issue can’t be resolved because it doesn’t rank high enough on Google’s priorities.

So what do you think? Is Google Email Continuity a viable option for businesses of any size?

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New “Cuil” search engine even less impressive than Live.com

Paul Cunningham — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:16:48 +0000

I’m not a big fan of search engines that can’t return good results . The new Cuil search engine has been launched, developed by ex-Google engineers, and I’m disappointed so far .

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Google Search versus Live Search

Paul Cunningham — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 10:01:51 +0000

I did a search via the Internet Explorer 7 search bar today which happened to still be configured to use Live.com (the default setting). I was quickly reminded why I stick to Google instead of Live. Not only didn’t the first page of results have what I was looking for, it didn’t even have any Microsoft.com results.

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Exchange Server Pro » Google

Google Discontinues Message Continuity

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