• Themes: You can completely change the way GMail looks using themes
• Chat: You can launch video and audio chat right from within your browser, no downloads required
• Backup your email: You can back up your email onto a different platform anytime you want. So you don’t have to feel  you depend on The Big G
• Audit: You can see all the locations you’ve signed in and out from
• Contacts: Contact management is a real breeze on Gmail and integrates nicely with other platforms too.
• Consolidation: GMail lets you consolidate different email accounts in one place
• URLs: As Gmail is web based you can bookmark locations and send them to your friends
• Keep email on your desktop: You can download gadgets and even an entire Google Desktop which integrates nicely with your email
• Search: Google is the master of search and whether you’re looking for milk churners or fat burners you’ll always be able to find them in your mailbox
• Experiment: Google Labs always has new exciting features in development, so if you’re so inclined, you may want to give them a whirl.

Head off and read the post.

It compares the actual outage of Gmail over the last year against industry standard downtime for GroupWise, Lotus and Exchange. It’s not a 100% fair comparison, as the platforms the solutions run on are different (cloud vs data centre), but a user isn’t really concerned about how the technology is delivered, just what level of service they are exposed to.

The post also talks about another development on Google’s side. They are extending the 99.9% SLA promise to Premier Edition customers across a number of other cloud offerings including Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Talk. It’s an interesting development, particularly as my personal biggest concern with cloud computer is reliability. This move will help drive expectations and the levels required from other providers. 99.9% reliability works out to 10 hours downtime per year (if my calculations are correct), which should be enough for pretty much anyone (although not everyone would agree)

Do you use Google Apps? How reliable do you find them?

The web was ablaze yesterday with people complaining about the latest outage of Gmail. It started with AnaisAmy asking for help on Twitter as she had problems getting to Gmail. Withing a few minutes quite a few people were posting Tweets to the same effect. Turns out Gmail had a real outage (they needed their own fail whale) and millions of people (up to 20 million) were affected and left in the dark. Later on Google issued an apology which included the following:

We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts. We followed all the emails to our support team and user group, we fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends, and we saw the many Twitter posts. (We also heard from plenty of Googlers, who use Gmail for company email.) We never take for granted the commitment we’ve made to running an email service that you can count on.

Now GMail is only one of a number of “Cloud” applications that have suffered an outage recently. Cloud Computing refers to those applications that are entirely or partly hosted on a managed infrastructure somewhere on the Internet. The question in my mind is this: Where would your business be if you were dependent on these applications? Apologies are one thing, but if your company is losing money every minute due to an outage of a service you are reliant on, what recourse do you have? Gmail is a free applications, but that doesn’t mean that Google they don’t have the money to support it (charging people $1 to use the service for example, won’t help improve reliability).

If you decide to go this way, make sure you always have a disaster recovery plan in case, some way you can operate your business if your applications aren’t available. And if you don’t at least make sure you have some recourse so that if your SLA isn’t met, someone else is liable for your losses.

Image details: Last-Minute Tax Filers Rush To Finish Returns served by picapp.com

Ever wondered if you should be using Outlook or Gmail? Well, Lifehacker have put together a great write-up comparing features between the two ways of approaching email. Now, strictly speaking, the two mechanisms are totally different beasts, with Outlook designed for the corporate market, while Gmail being focused on the masses. However, it’s good to see the strengths and weaknesses of each.

One thing worth noting is that features from different packages tend to migrate to each other as the products evolve. It will be interesting to see how the products develop in the future