Google adds downtime support for Exchange 2010

Google's Message Continuity service will now support Microsoft Exchange 2010 Servers, the company announced Tuesday.

The Postini-based email continuity service launched late last year for Exchange 2003 and 2007. Support had now been extended to the latest version of Exchange Server.

Google's service enabled Exchange accounts to be synchronised to record sent and received messages, deletions and folder changes during an outage.

Pricing for the service was set at US$25 per user per year or an additional US$12 per user per month for existing Apps customers.

Google had gone to great lengths in recent months to point out superior uptime rates compared to running Microsoft systems on in-house infrastructure - an attempt to get more enterprise users to switch to Google for corporate email.

Last month Google ditched "scheduled downtime" from its service level agreement for Google Apps products, including Postini, and promised 99.9 per cent availability.

Adrian Soghoian, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Postini Services again pointed out that Gmail only suffered seven minutes downtime per month compared to the five hours on average faced by Exchange users.