Comments on: 330k users: Google Apps hits Catholic schools

By: Tezz

Tezz — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 09:06:27 +0000

I would wager Google would have already suffered what would be catagorised as a “major outage” for most people, but they will have geographically separate data farms for their storage so unless something totally catastrophic happens no will ever notice.

By: Ninja

Ninja — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 06:10:08 +0000

This is the DEC, should have caught up by 2025.

By: Renai LeMay

Renai LeMay — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 05:06:29 +0000

Really? They block Google Docs etc? That seems stupid. And it also doesn’t make much sense for the staff not to be on Gmail if everyone else is. Most universities have gone for a standard staff/student solution.

By: Ninja

Ninja — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 05:01:39 +0000

You are right about exchange for admin, but teachers are using this too. Student mail is based on gmail, but that’s as far as Google apps extend. Even basic Google Docs is blocked for students.

By: Renai LeMay

Renai LeMay — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 04:09:34 +0000

As far as I understood it, NSW DEC still uses Exchange etc for admin staff, but Google Apps for students/teachers?

By: Renai LeMay

Renai LeMay — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 04:08:52 +0000

“They need to develop it a little more to get it closer to excel to make her happy.”

+1 to this. I hate Google Apps for spreadsheets also.

By: Renai LeMay

Renai LeMay — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 04:08:25 +0000

Very true, Steve. I have been covering this cloud email space for some time (and I use Google Apps myself), and I have very very rarely seen any problems with it. As you say, there is a huge amount of wrath which would come down on Google’s (or Microsoft’s) head if they were ever to experience a major outage.

By: Dr Steve Hodgkinson

Dr Steve Hodgkinson — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 07:41:20 +0000

Good stuff … I hope this works out well for them … which I’m sure it will. The interesting thing with these stories is that the move to a large scale cloud service like this feels risky because you seem to have no power to influence a massive global player like Google … until you realise that the “wrath of the crowd” gives greater practical collective leverage than any contract or SLA ever did. If things go wrong it is transparently visible and fixed very quickly (often before the customer is even aware there is, or was, a problem) … otherwise the wrath of the crowd is awoken and the incident is hot news in the twiterati and tech press. This creates much sharper performance incentives than either apply to most in-house IT departments or can be created using a contract and an SLA in a traditional managed services arrangement.

By: jasontoheal

jasontoheal — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 04:44:13 +0000

Great article. And quite newsworthy. I look forward to Google Apps and more products like it becoming more common.

By: Ninja

Ninja — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:26:25 +0000

Would be great to see the NSW DEC, who are already using gmail for student email, roll this out as well, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

By: PeterA

PeterA — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 01:52:52 +0000

My wife still hates google spreadsheets.

They need to develop it a little more to get it closer to excel to make her happy.

Otherwise, googles documents system is fantastic. (an “offline” editor would be good though; couldn’t be that hard to write a thick app to do this for those offline times could it?)

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 23:19:02 +0000

Typo; kicke doff