Business Tools Blog

I am a huge fan of Google Groups.  At Zayo, we use Google Groups to communicate meeting agendas and collaborate on projects.  Since April 2008, I’ve written 8 blog posts on how to use Google Groups.

In mid-July Google Groups experienced performance issues that made the product unusable.  I learned the hard way that Google customer service was non-existent for this product.   On July 21st, I was at my wits end.  Dan Caruso offered to reach out to the senior team at Google for help.  Dan’s email to Larry Page is posted on BearonBusiness.com today.  Stay tuned - BearonBusiness.com will reveal how this story ends.  (Hopefully there won’t be a sequel)

The email I sent Dan reporting the problem is shown below.

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Dan,

Google Groups have been experiencing a few bugs lately that make it all but impossible to use.

• Links break – frequently all of the links on a page or the home page break.  Usually the links that break are the links to files uploaded to the Google Group or to another page within a Google Group.  We haven’t had any experience with broken links to external websites.

• All content, words, pictures and links and prior revisions from pages or the home page disappear. [See below, we had 20 revisions and every revision has disappeared]

We’ve used Google’s process to enter the bug into Google Groups Help Forum Discussions > Is Something Broken

Another user (not a Google Employee) responded:

“What you are experiencing has been reported by many other groups in messages here. Apparently pages are broken again. Also for at least a week Google Groups have apparently been under very heavy use. Some functions work very slowly, others do not work at all and some work erratically. Nothing you can do about it except keep all material on pages in back up .doc files so you can copy and paste to rebuild pages.

Accept the fact that the Files and Pages of Google Groups have been unreliable since the day they were added to Groups. The lesson is plain: Do not use them for important material.

To permanently archive the same information so that it cannot be deleted or lost, simply put it into the text of e-mail messages to the Group or place it into a doc or other suitable file type like a spreadsheet file and attach it to a message to the Group. In four years, in my Group, Group mail has remained reliable with momentary slowdowns or other minor problems. In four years not one message or attachment to messages in my Group archive has been lost and we have many thousands of them. The members use the old messages and attachments extensively. During the same time period, the Files section has been broken most of the time. Pages have erratically not worked, but have worked most of the time.”

We asked if using the forum was the only way to report bugs.  Another user responded:

“Looks like it. I phoned Google in CA with my problem, and all I got was an automated receptionist referring me to the help web page. Apparently, we’re our own tech.”

Sandi Mays
Chief of Staff
Zayo Group
www.zayo.com
www.businesstoolsblog.com
www.bearonbusiness.com