Here is an issue with moving to "the cloud", and even more so moving to the cloud with Google. I recently moved our company's intranet over to Google Sites. I wanted a low cost, easy way for department heads to be able to manage and update their sections of our intranet from anywhere. Google Sites was perfect for this. Recently though Google made some unannounced changes to Sites that broke the intranet.
Google apparently decided to host images and code for the new Sites on different domains than they had previously been on. The problem with that is we use internet blocking software at our retail locations and all domains (even location of graphics) have to be opened up in the software.
Since we had no warning or control over the switch - everyone just came in one morning and could no longer see or navigate the page (we also lost all our navigation links on the site for some reason and had to set them all back up).
So since this is in the cloud (and mostly because it is Google) we received no warning or notification that changes were coming - they just came. We were given no control over the change. I did not even receive an email about it when it was complete. I had to start digging once the phone calls started pouring in. Had this been on our own servers, we would have had the option to upgrade at the best possible time for us (which would not have been the moment we walked in the door on May 19th).
Had it not been a secret (for whatever reason) we would have prepared the PCs ahead of time to access the new domains Google was going to use to host these. But this is what happens when you let these things out of your control.
We use the free version of Google Apps for this intranet. But even so - with Google making such a push to get business to take their cloud services seriously- it's a pretty stupid way to go. You're not going to talk us into upgrading to additional features if you keep jacking around with us.
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