The solution to this is for Google to explicitly tell the end user that the upgrade involves a migration to bigger and better infrastructure, during which their accounts will be inaccessible for a number of hours. Then let the user schedule the migration to minimize the inconvenience. During the migration, show the account status as "Migrating..." instead of empty. Problem solved.
The solution to this is for Google to explicitly tell the end user that the upgrade involves a migration to bigger and better infrastructure, during which their accounts will be inaccessible for a number of hours. [...] Problem solved.
Sorry, but that isn't even close to a solution. The problem here is that a business-critical facility was off-line for pretty much an entire business day, at who-knows-what cost to the business.
Many small businesses that use facilities like this are trading internationally or otherwise need 24-hour functionality, so the idea that you could just schedule something to "minimize the inconvenience" doesn't really help them at all.
I have some clients who are paying MessageLabs something like two orders of magnitude more than Google charges per seat. They would, undertstandably, scream blue murder if their entire corporate email went down for 24hrs.
I have other clients who wouldn't dream of paying $5 per user per month, because they get free email forwarding with their domain name or cheapo web hosting.
I have _many many_ clients, who if I gave then sufficient notice and said "we're upgrading some infrastructure, we need to take the mail server down for up to 24 hrs, does after close of business the Friday after next suit you, or would you prefer we did it Sat night/Sun morning?", would be _perfectly_ happy. (with the possible exception along the lines of "oh, we're at a trade show that week, can you move it forward or wait till a week later?")
I wonder how big the crossover is between companies who really absolutely _have_ to have 24/7/365 email uptime at better tha 3 nines, but who haven't already got something more robust in place than a handful of personal gmail accounts?
I wonder how big the crossover is between companies who really absolutely _have_ to have 24/7/365 email uptime at better tha 3 nines, but who haven't already got something more robust in place than a handful of personal gmail accounts?
The problem here appears to be that Google's pathway to get to such functionality -- assuming a service branded "Google Apps for Business" does in fact offer a higher standard of service than three 9s and isn't pure marketing spin -- is broken in a way that could undermine an organisation that wanted to make that change.
Obviously that won't affect all businesses, but if you're in that boat then it seems Google can't even help you get to their better services without risking exactly the kind of interruption that a more serious/professional service is supposed to avoid. That seems bizarre to me, and doesn't speak well of how they run their business-level services. Combined with their recent trend of killing off even moderately popular services altogether, it doesn't exactly fill you with confidence about trusting Google with anything your business really depends on.
It wasn't business-critical before, since they were using the free version. Businesses don't use free services with no SLA for business-critical things. Unless they don't know how to do business.
Don't make assumptions on what's business critical and what's not. Not every business has the same level of free capital, circumstances or domain knowledge to handle everything theoretically correctly. There is implicit trust in working with companies like Google; you expect everything to work properly. They don't have to, of course, but when they don't, articles like this chip away at the confidence we all have in Google.
Just because it doesn't work for everyone does not mean that a scheduled outage would not be a significant improvement for large percentages of customers. Most businesses can find a 6 hour window.
