Gmail is free, but is it the best?

Last week Google launched a new revision to the heavily used Gmail program.  Gmail was down for roughly 100 minutes  due to the new revision launch and data center problems (“data center network issue”) along with heavy customer usage. The outage was during peak East Coast usage 9 AM until noon on Thursday. Google has apologized for the inconvenience.

Several of our clients are still are experiencing problems logging into Gmail.

Google did not disclose the number of users who could not connect to their Gmail accounts. Google’s assessment of the disruption was “relatively minor”. In early May, Google had a larger outage. This outage brought out another apology from Senior VP level.

I am a big fan of free, but I would only rely on a service like this for personal or non work related apps.  I know that budgets are slim for academic institutions, but many schools rely on email as a way to communicate with parents about students and student’s safety issues. This is why I would look for a partner with a redundant data center and hosted email.

 You need to rely on a stable application and service for mission critical apps, which Gmail does not always supply.