Posts Tagged ‘Gmail’
Google Suffers 2nd Email Disruption in a Month
Google Inc’s Web-based email service on Thursday suffered its second technical problem in a month as users reported difficulty accessing their contacts.
The disruption, which took 2-1/2 hours to resolve, followed a two-hour outage of Google’s news website this week. Earlier this month, a majority of its email users were unable to access the service for more than an hour after routers got overloaded during a routine server upgrade. The series of disruptions comes as Google tries to compete with Microsoft Corp and International Business Machines Corp by extending its services to business users – who are likely to be less tolerant of long outages.
Reports of the latest glitch flooded the Twitter microblogging site, with users posting comments highlighting and griping about the situation. “A problem with Google Contacts caused many Gmail users to experience slowness and degraded service for about an hour today,” Google said in a statement. “Mail was back to full speed for everyone around 8 am Pacific and the issue affecting Contacts was resolved shortly after. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.” Gmail already competes with Microsoft’s Hotmail and Yahoo Inc’s Web-based e-mail. Google offers its email service for free but also sells a version to businesses with extra features and technical support for $50 per user per year. Fear of outages, in addition to security concerns, has been a reason many businesses are wary of adopting “cloud computing” technologies offered by Google as well as Salesforce.com and Amazon.com, which help deliver data and services over the Internet.
Gmail Now Supports All Microsoft Word Docs
Google has added Docs support for Microsoft Word (.doc and .docx). When you receive an attachment with a document in one of these formats, you now have the option to open them in Google Docs. I could have sworn this feature already existed, but apparently that functionality only worked with other document types.
The new feature works in the vanilla Gmail, as well as in Google Apps (all editions). To use this feature, simply click “View” at the bottom of a message that contains one of these documents, and you will be whizzed off to the Google Docs viewer for your attachment.
It’s great that Google is building out support for all these document types — it really does make “Going Google” easier. If Microsoft wants to combat this, they are going to have to start offering similar features — like the ability to open Google Docs directly into Word.