Google Apps Offers Dual Delivery, Health Check

Dual Delivery, an enterprise IT administration feature for Google Message Security, supports migration to a new e-mail service and backs up each message in the process on two different mail hosts. The idea is that users can get used to a new e-mail platform, preferably Gmail, without seeing any disruption in their message service.

Google's Postini e-mail security team March 31 unveiled Dual Delivery, an IT administration feature for Google Message Security that supports migration to a new e-mail service and backs up each message in the process.

Google Message Security, which helps prevent spam and viruses before they hit servers, is available at no extra charge in Google Apps Premier Edition for businesses for $50 per user, per year.

Dual Delivery provides migration to a new e-mail service without interruption by letting users send copies of their e-mail to two different mail hosts. The idea is that users can get used to a new e-mail platform-Google hopes it will be Gmail-without seeing any disruption in their message service.

To make it easier for users to migrate to Google Apps, the Postini team has included in Dual Delivery a "Send a copy to Google Apps Gmail" feature that lets users test Gmail without interrupting current practice.

Those who do choose to move to Google Apps can enable the "Use Google Apps Gmail" feature in the Postini administration console to route all mail to Gmail without manually rerouting their content records. 

Dual Delivery can be used as a secondary e-mail access point. IT administrators who want to give users Web-based remote or mobile e-mail access can let their employees read and write e-mail through a secondary inbox.

Google Postini team member Gopal Shah said Dual Delivery is now available to Postini customers through the Delivery Manager settings in the Postini administration console.

The migration and backup tool comes two weeks after Google launched a migration tool to make it easy for administrators to switch corporate e-mail systems from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. These efforts show how serious Google is about increasing its messaging and collaboration market share versus Microsoft, IBM and others.

The Postini team also added a  Google Message Security reporting feature called Health Check, which it bills as a self-service tune-up for companies' Postini filters. Health Check is another reporting feature that lets administrators see how current configurations affect the effectiveness of antispam and antivirus filters.

Google acquired Postini as a way to provide Web-based messaging security, content policy management and message archiving tools for Google Apps, the company's collaboration suite hosted on Google's servers and served to users through the cloud.

The new Postini tools come two weeks after Google added an alert system to warn Gmail users if their accounts may have been compromised. Gmail now flashes a bright red message if an account may have been accessed from another country.

These tools also show that Google is clearly tightening its messaging security in the wake of a broad hack attack on its Gmail system, which led to Google closing its Chinese search engine and rerouting users to Google.hk on March 22.