The recent spate of natural disasters here in Australia has had many of my clients talking to me (and in general) about Disaster Recovery in the cloud for their IT Infrastructure. DR to the cloud is an ideal first step for many businesses considering cloud computing, it allows for a inexpensive, scalable, offsite infrastructure that can be called upon to in the event of a disaster scenario arising.

With impeccable timing for those of us in Australia, Google has just introduced Google Message Continuity, a hosted DR solution for on-premise Microsoft Exchange mailservers.

Google Message Continuity is a robust, easy to implement Disaster Recovery Solution using their leading cloud computing infrastructure to compliment an existing Microsoft Exchange environment. Google Message Continuity provides dual delivery and message state synchronisation between users Outlook clients and Gmail, allowing users to continue to work in Gmail in the event of an outage / disaster scenario affecting the on-premise Microsoft Exchange environment.

Here is a short video overview of how GMC works:

If you’re interested in learning more about how GMC can be used in your organisation, please send me an email

Wow, this is pretty awesome news!! Google Australia have just announced that they are after launcing Street Views for lots of locations around Australia. I’ve just had a quick peek on Google Maps and I can see that they have covered the area around our apartment in Brisbane quite well, and I can’t wait to get home tonight and try this out in Google Earth on the mac. This is really, really exciting news though, especially as I should now be able to put together some mashups to show family and friends back home various places that I am day to day around Brisbane.

I’m a huge fan, and a huge user of the wonderful Gmail, which I use as part of Google Apps for my domain. However, I’ve been longing, and I mean longing, for as long as I can remember, for an efficent process to sycn and manage my Gmail contacts on my mac. Recently, SpanningSync have introduced Contacts sync alongside their really neat little Google Calendar Sync application, but, I have yet to try this out. However, it would appear that there is no longer a need. Google have just announced, via their mac blog that they have just introduced Address Book Sync, to go in hand with the latest OSX 10.5.3 update. I’m going to be tidying up my Google Contacts today, and heading home to try this out later on this evening to see how it all goes.

Remember however, if you are going to go do this today, to back up both your Address Book and Gmail contacts first, as it has the potential to go wrong and cause you lots of pain!!

Is anyone else having problems subscribing to new feeds in Google Reader today? I’ve tried to subscribe to three different feeds, and each one of them has been giving me problems! Not something I’m used to in the usually flawless Google Reader!

For a very long time, I have longed for a decent to-do list. Better again, one that was online, allowing me to access it from anywhere. I’ve tried out a few different solutions over the years, but none have really worked for me.

Today, I discovered Remember The Milk, a very cool, Australian developed website, that is rapidly growing in popularity and features. There are currently over 500,000 users of RTM, so I’m guessing with those kind of numbers, there must be something exciting going on!

So far, I’m very impressed, I can hook it into my Google Calendar, allowing me to view as well as create tasks there, as well as create tasks via email and the web etc. Only thing that I would like to see is a Google Desktop plugin, but, I think I’m going to be hooked regardless!