Colleges Outsourcing Email To MS Live, Google

Andy Guess tips us to his article at Inside Higher Ed offering a detailed look at the snowballing trend of colleges outsourcing their email infrastructure, mostly to Google and Microsoft Live. Even outsourcing just email would presage big changes in the work that IT departments do on campus; but more such changes are on the horizon as schools grapple with entering freshmens' already entrenched online habits.

Comments

Re:Takes a load off IT.

[Ed Avis]

All the students need is a terminal account on a Linux box somewhere with mutt or pine (and IMAP). That will be more than adequate for the official email communication needed as part of their course. If for some unfathomable reason they'd rather use Outhouse or some other spam-ridden monstrosity instead of pine, leave them to it.