Convenient backup for Google Gmail

We have been proponents of Google’s mail service almost since the day it was announced. Low cost (or free), huge storage space, secure IMAP, plus all the resources of Google to keep making it better. Over the past couple of years we’ve helped a number of companies move off of costly private mail systems, and everyone has been happy with the result.

But, no matter how big Google, Amazon, Yahoo, or anyone else gets, or how much money they have, their services will eventually go down. Volumes have been written in just the past week about Google’s Gmail outage. Read the official Google blog post, or yesterday’s Wall Street Journal story.

So this seems like a good time to encourage our readers to take time this weekend to pick up some new ideas to help make your e-mail more reliable, and use a nice free program to back up all of your Google mail.
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Social media and your business

Everywhere you look these days there are stories about social media in general, and Twitter in particular. Just a few examples are: Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Advertising Age (here, here, here, and many more).

Nobody knows where this is all heading and there isn’t any road map to help guide your particular business. But there are a few things that are already clear:
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More criticism of annual employee reviews

We’ve written about the dreaded employee performance review before. NPR’s Morning Edition today had a story about the annual performance review process. The transcript should be online to read soon, but you can listen to the piece online now: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100746960