There have been lots of half-way and somewhat kludgy sync tools between Microsoft's Outlook and Google Mail to date (including the ongoing disaster which is the Google Calendar Sync). But this sounds very interesting ...
Cemaphore Systems, a company that specializes in e-mail backup services, is expected to announce on Wednesday a new product that allows people to automatically synchronize their e-mail, calendar and address books between Microsoft’s Outlook and Google’s Gmail. The service, called MailShadow for Google Apps, is being pitched as a “email continuity and disaster recovery solution.” In other words, it is intended to provide users of Outlook and Exchange, Microsoft’s mail server, with a secure backup. As such, it represents an interesting use of the Google computing “cloud” to provide a service for Microsoft users.
But the technology also would allow businesses to rip out their Exchange servers and run Outlook, which millions of users are familiar with, directly from the Google servers.
“If you are an I.T. guy and you can change the back end from Exchange to Google, and keep Outlook for your users, that’s a really interesting proposition,” said Matt Cain, an analyst with Gartner. “We’ll have to see if it works.”
Other possibilities are offline access of Gmail boxes (via Outlook). The service is free for now (cough-gammatesting-cough), but it's "possible" that the company will charge customers in the future.
Interesting ...
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Once you add in the concerns from your later article about Lakehead University, though, you get to ask similar questions:
Would you want your company's internal business hosted on a site where US governmental agencies can sift through the information with little to no oversight and with seemingly no requirements to safeguard the information that it collects?
"Joe, send me the files on the Mona Lisa Overdrive, but don't do it in email. NSA might get wind of it."
A fair enough question. For that matter, though GMail has been pretty secure, you're still counting on the security of Google and Cemaphore to avoid being hacked, not even counting governmental bits.
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