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Wed 2 Sep 2009
Windows 7 Group Policy reference – Windows 7 90 day evaluation – Hyper-V drivers and parent partition – Gmail outage
By Michael Pietroforte | 2 Comments | Permalink | Trackback | Previous | Next- Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Group Policy reference
- Windows 7 Will Boot In As Little As 11 Seconds
- Windows 7 Enterprise 90 Day Evaluation Now Available
- Users abandon XP for Vista, Windows 7
- VirtualPCGuy: Is it a scalability issue to run drivers in the Hyper-V parent partition (answer: no)
- Google gets Gmail back on its feet after outage Is Gmail really an alternative to Exchange? It seems not.
“Is Gmail really an alternative to Exchange? It seems not.”
Our school just recently outsourced our student email hosting to Microsoft, through a program called Live @ Edu. It’s backed by Exchange 2007 and students use a modified OWA interface.
In the past 5 weeks, we’ve experienced entire system outages (another just today) and admin area outages that easily have already equated to the sum of all outages I’ve experienced with my Gmail account over the past few years.
If Gmail isn’t an alternative to Exchange, I’m not sure what your criteria are. I’ve got a sneaky suspicion that your addition of “It seems not.” speaks more towards a possible bias than the result of any real research into the area.
If you do find the time to run some real numbers on uptime comparing the two systems, I’d honestly be interested in the result. Granted, there’s more to things than uptime, but your quip was based solely on downtime.
I think Gmail is fine for students. It is certainly a nice freemailer. However, in my view Gmail is no option for businesses. The main reason is that Gmail lacks many important features. Exchange is a very complex software, so you have to invest some time to make it work flawlessly. But then it is very stable. Once everything is configured it will run without problems for years without needing much attention. As to research data, you will always get different results depending on who sponsored the study. I just trust my experience. As far I know Gmail’s uptime is okay, but not outstanding. By the way, I am using it myself for years with Outlook. The web interface is nice compared to other freemailers, but certainly no match for Outlook.