Last week, it was the Google calendar part of Google Apps that had a few bad days. This week, it is Google’s Gmail taking a turn in the barrel, so to speak. Yesterday I was out of service, with my Gmail, and today others are complaining. My service has been restored, thank you Google. BTW, I am also a paid Google Apps customer. I have alternate email and will continue to do so for awhile. The Google App Status Dashboard is still showing service disruption. At 7:33 EDT, this morning, Google indicated that the majority of users had service restored.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced their new suite of Office Products and began to take pre-orders, for Office 2010. Today I learned that Microsoft will make their Office Web Apps available on June 15, 2010. That is also the date for stores to start selling the Office 2010 products. Google engineers and owners cannot be happy with the problems of this past week. A battle of who will reign in the cloud SaaS market, for business and other applications, continues to be waged. Microsoft has raised the stakes with the recent announcements of their cloud based offerings.

Google has been out in front, trying to tell people to stop relying on Microsoft Office running on their desktop computers. Their premise of using Google’s servers and software, at a per user cost less than Microsoft’s, is a sound one. The problem, that is looming large now, is the reliability of taking such a position. The other large problem for Google is the installed user base that Microsoft holds. Some estimate it at over 80 percent of the desktop market. The large number of Microsoft resellers and consultants give the people at Microsoft, another advantage.

If you have not backed up your Gmail, or any other email program that you use, then now is the time. Disaster comes without warning, so if you have lucked out so far, don’t delay any longer. You can backup email offline in Gmail, Hotmail and other web based email programs, for free. If you want to store your backups on cloud based server services there are some free ones. The storage amount given is not large, but good enough for important emails and other files. You can always buy more storage if needed. One service that has garnered good reviews is Backupify. Backupify will back up your online accounts with services like Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and more. Right now you can get an account with 2GB of storage for free. Prices go up from there. You can visit their website at Backupify.com for current pricing.

The next few months and remainder of this year will be an interesting one for Google and Microsoft. Regardless of the outcome, have a solid disaster recovery plan of your own. Did I say backup?

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