Google Gives a Big Damn about Google Apps

I’ve never gotten an email from Google that I didn’t specifically ask for. Ever. Until today.

I got an email from them explaining that Google Calendar may experience some outages tomorrow. Not just one email, but two. Normally, they use their blog to talk about this sort of stuff, but this time they sent it directly to my inbox. Their second email (see below) seems to address common questions that may have been raised by the much shorter first email.

In general, Google never sends out emails like this, especially for its free services, such as Google Apps (I use the free version). This underscores the priority Google is now placing on its “Google Apps” brand, the presumed competitor to Microsoft’s Live Office.

Server-side application are commonly misunderstood as less secure, less available, or less powerful than desktop counterparts. Google is fighting tooth-and-nail to fight that presumption, and this email proves it. And they’re crossing into new territory to do it. Of course, it’s also possible that Google’s applications rarely go down so such emails are extremely rare, but I’d argue that the second email from them proves they aren’t taking this lightly.

Here the first email:

Hello Michi,

We wanted to inform you that we are planning to conduct routine maintenance to Google Calendar between 8AM and 9PM on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 . During this time, this service may be unavailable to some of your users. Please inform your users about this planned maintenance appropriately. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we work to improve Google Calendar.

If you have any questions, you can contact the Google Apps Support team through the Google Apps Help center (http://www.google.com/support/a/).

Sincerely,

The Google Apps Team

Here’s the second email (12 hours later) that seems to be addressing some FAQs that got:

Dear Michi,

Earlier an email was sent regarding your michikono.com Google Apps account, notifying you that we are planning to conduct routine maintenance to Google Calendar between 8AM and 9PM PDT on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 (3PM GMT on April 26th to 4AM GMT on April 27th). We understand that maintaining the highest level of reliability and uptime is critical to your organization and to your end users. Thus, we want to provide you with additional information about the upgrade and explain in detail the impact it may have on your users — specifically, that only a subset of your users will be affected, and only for a few minutes each.

Why are we doing an upgrade?
We are updating some of our servers as we continue to improve Google Calendar. This is a normal maintenance update, and as with all updates we look to minimize the impact to our end users.

How will this impact my end users?
The impact to your users should be minimal. Only a subset of your users should be affected by the upgrade. These users may have trouble accessing their Google Calendars for a short period of time, generally less than 5-10 minutes each.

Will Google Calendar be down from 8AM to 9PM PDT?
No. This is the window of time that the maintenance upgrade will take place. During this time some users will experience issues accessing their calendar, but only for a short period of time each.

As always, we continuously look to improve our communication with our administrators. If you have any feedback or any additional questions regarding this maintenance upgrade, please feel free to contact the Google Apps Support team through the Google Apps Help center (http://www.google.com/support/a/).

Sincerely,

The Google Apps Team

So either Google’s taking this maintenance extremely carefully, or someone got fired for writing a crappy email that required a follow up. 🙂