Gables Residential, an Atlanta-based Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), turned to Google Message Continuity to supplement their Microsoft® Exchange 2007 email environment and minimize email downtime. Gables Residential owns, manages and develops property throughout Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Houston, South Florida, D.C., and Southern California, contributing to a portfolio of over 38,000 apartment homes. With their managed properties distributed across the country and over multiple time zones, it was critically important that their employees always have access to their email. Gables Residential turned to Google Message Continuity, a cloud-based disaster recovery solution, to enhance the reliability of their email environment.

Google Message Continuity works by synchronizing all email stored on Microsoft® Exchange servers into Gmail, using a simple plug-in that ensures all messages are always present in both email inboxes. If Microsoft® Exchange is unavailable, users can simply login to Gmail with their usual credentials and take advantage of Gmail’s reliability–available 99.984% of the time in 2010–to send and receive messages. The simplicity of the set-up, the minimal maintenance and deployment costs, and the ability to keep their distributed workforce productive during email outages is what differentiated Google Message Continuity over other continuity alternatives.

What’s more, through using Google Message Continuity Gables Residential learned first-hand the benefits of a 100% web environment, and plans to switch from Microsoft® Exchange to Google Apps for Business later this year. With emails constantly being replicated in Gmail, switching to the rest of Google Apps can be a seamless move, both for IT admins and for users. Gables Residential plans on taking advantage of this smooth deployment path in May and looks forward to deploying Google Apps across its entire user base.

Join us during a live webinar as James Hamrick, Director of IT, explains how Gables Residential was able to successfully use Google Message Continuity to improve the reliability of their Microsoft® Exchange environment while paving the way for a 100% web future with Google Apps for Business.

Register for this live webcast on April 20th, 11 a.m. Eastern Time, 2011. We hope to see you there!

Posted by Adrian Soghoian, Google Enterprise Product Marketing

Back in December we announced a new email continuity service that helps organizations running Microsoft Exchange® 2003 and 2007 Servers bolster the reliability of their email environments. Today, we’re excited to announce that Google Message Continuity now also supports Microsoft Exchange® 2010 Servers, helping to protect an even broader range of users from business continuity and email access disruptions.

Recent research conducted by the Radicati Group suggests that users of Microsoft Exchange® face on average over five hours of downtime a month, which is a combination of both unplanned outages and regularly scheduled downtime¹. Let’s compare this to Gmail. Google Apps offers a service level agreement of 99.9% for all of its services. However, as we noted back in January, our own measurements showed that Gmail only experienced on average seven minutes of downtime per month throughout 2010 – 46 times less than an Exchange-based environment – which represented a total uptime average of 99.984% for the entire year. Google Message Continuity works by leveraging this outstanding record of reliability and extending it to Microsoft Exchange® users, allowing them to benefit from the availability and redundancy of Google’s services.

For more information on Google Message Continuity and how a cloud-based continuity solution can help your email environment remain more secure, accessible, and reliable, stop by www.google.com/postini to learn more.

1. The Radicati Group, 2010. "Corporate IT Survey – Messaging & Collaboration, 2010-2011"

Our customers expect Google Apps to be available all the time, from anywhere, and we're passionately committed to proving them right. We measure the success of every server request, every moment of every day, and the numbers support our belief that the cloud can be more reliable than on-premises software. We’ve seen in the past that Gmail can offer ten times greater reliability than a typical on-premises Microsoft® Exchange installation, and this got us to thinking...could we bring Gmail’s reliability to companies currently using Microsoft® Exchange? Today, we’re excited to introduce a new Postini service which accomplishes just that.

If you run Microsoft® Exchange 2003 or 2007, Google Message Continuity is a new email continuity service that can help you ensure that your users never lose access to email during a Microsoft® Exchange outage, whether planned or unplanned. By synchronizing your on-premises accounts with Google’s cloud, Google Message Continuity gives you access to your up-to-date email inboxes (through the Gmail interface) no matter what happens to your on-premises servers. And once your servers come back up after an outage, messages sent and received, plus message state changes (like deletions and folder assignments) that are recorded by Google Message Continuity during the outage, are then synchronized with your servers, allowing users to seamlessly transition from Microsoft® Exchange to Gmail, then back to Microsoft® Exchange.