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raverbashing

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine was shut out of Google Apps (yes, the paying one) for "abuse"

Just like that, leaving them locked out of their (company) emails.

There is a support line but it's helpless, it said "Your account may be unlocked in 72h"

Yes, may be unlocked. This is not a proper answer to a paying customer Google.

So I lost my confidence in Google Apps, if I need a similar service better contract from somebody else.

(It's been a while but I still haven't heard the rest of the story)

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What good alternatives are there to Google apps? I may hate them for not having support, but because it's such a good product i may be forced to use it.

Word? Excel?

Back before Google Apps, I was using 1and1 for hosted Exchange.

You get support if you pay for Google Apps for Business.

This person claims he was locked out of his paid google apps for business account. I think one solution is to purchase through a google apps provider. You pay the same costs but they get some cut of the money for providing service. I think this is the model Google wants to implement, have another company handle simple support and they can handle real issues when contacted by the company, not the end users. I think this actually happened for us, but it is invisible. We had an issue with Mac mail and google apps when we started. It wasn't behaving properly. We contacted our provider who I think contacted google and an engineer actually looked at the logs and explained it as a bug in Mac mail which after a timeout was initiating more connections and flooding the server.

Anyway I think google apps providers probably can provide sufficient support, maybe google voice just needs to get there.

Exactly. It was a payed account.

Providers may be a good idea, although I'm skeptical about the ability of Google Apps providers of having direct channels to Google support. Your story is certainly interesting and favorable in that aspect.

The provider claimed he had his chat list filled with google engineers because he would go out to googleplex and met them. Dunno if it's true, but my idea was that I am going to pay the same amount for google apps and these people will be more responsive if i do have issues. I think it worked out.

"This person claims he was locked out of his paid google apps for business account."

Yes he did. And he didn't include what his service representative told him. You see on my paid account under the tools "Manage this account" there is a support tab, and that tab lets you send email to a real person with your account id and generally they respond reasonably quickly. So what what did they say? Now the poster says "locked out of his account" what did that mean? Can't login? Or can't send email? Can't use Drive? Can't use Calendar? Was it just him or everyone who uses the account? When you're paying for a service, if your service provider denies you that service you can sue them more easily.

Now I have been emailed when my logging application tried to send a bunch of emails, I was notified that it had been 'spamming' and disabled until the spam stopped. I sent back a nice explanation of what our systems were doing, and a whitelist of addresses that could send that sort of email, and they set it up. No more issue.

The bottom line is that there are missing bits in this anecdote that would help give context to the 'abuse' comment. But they are missing.

So I am actually a Google Apps Reseller. Our customers can go directly to Google for support, or through us. Most choose to come through us at no additional cost, some pay us for a higher level of support. Generally, we solve the easy stuff that doesn't actually require Google's intervention much faster than Google would for our customers, and are able typically able to get resolution to Google Support tickets for a couple reasons: (1) we are very experienced interfacing with Google Support (2) Because we are in the top tier of Google Apps Resellers (Enterprise Premier), our customers actually get a higher level of support by default.

The guy below who had another reseller claim they have all the Google Engineers on chat...that is probably true but they don't handle support issues. They will tell you to open a ticket, even if they are your friend.

Not sure why my comment above got down-voted. You DO get support from Google by paying for your Google Apps account.

Seriously just use office with a hosted exchange account somewhere. It just works and doesn't suffer from this sort of pain.

If your exchange hosting company goes down or dumps you, you have a copy of your mailbox, calendar etc already in a PST file on your disk.

Office 365?

Google apps has support if your big enough.

Anything else, if you run your business on it. Seriously.

Edit: Or your schoolwork, or anything important.

I really like the collaborative editing environment, but my concern over the potential danger of a loss of data that I have no control over means I'd give that up without thinking twice.

My solution is Dropbox and native apps.

Office 365? Free versions of the Word and Excel webapps can be tried via SkyDrive[1] and you can try the native app integration using the Office 2013 preview [2].

Other strong alternatives could be Zoho[3] or Zimbra[4], depending on your exact requirements.

[1] https://skydrive.live.com/

[2] http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/

[3] http://www.zoho.com/productivity-apps.html

[4] http://www.zimbra.com/products/

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