Google offers enterprise-savvy response to Gmail outage

Customers of Apps Premier, Google's hosted Apps suite that costs $50 per subscriber per year, will now get a free 15 days tacked on the end of their agreement. The move is an effort to pacify customers after the suite experienced three separate outages this month. But more important, Google also vowed to be better at keeping customers in the loop as outages are reported and remediated via a new dashboard.

IDG news reports that Google detailed the dashboard in an apologetic e-mail sent to Apps subscribers on Wednesday. In it, Google said the dashboard will help customers better track service problems:

That dashboard will provide descriptions of problems, especially of their impact on users; a regularly updated estimate of when the issues will be resolved; and, if necessary, a formal report within 48 hours of the resolution. The report will describe the incident, explain its cause, list corrective and preventive actions taken, and provide an outage timeline. Google officials will also make themselves available to participate in live discussions about the incident with Apps Premier administrators and their companies' managers.

That's a huge deal. Rather than just sitting and waiting, Apps admins will actually see what's going on and be able to provide real status reports to their users. That, along with the outage credit, will go a long way to helping customers view Apps as enterprise-ready.