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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.
Most of the academics I work with (professors, grad students, undergrads) already use either a regular gmail or yahoo account for their primary email address. Usually these services have better spam protection, higher storage limits, and better portability than a university email address.
I've worked IT at a College for 5 years now. We actually had a push for MS live taking over our e-mail from some of our co-workers. It has always scared me, and much prefer keeping it in house. M$ was going to do everything for us for FREE. They would keep us up with the times, keep data secure, etc...
My two main issues:
1. If (when) M$ starts charging for this down the road, then what? They could charge virtually anything they wanted for us to get our e-mails back if we didn't like their new price.
2. We do sometimes lose connection to the internet, internal e-mail will no longer work
As an IT guy at a University that's looking to outsource e-mail, it's more a lack of resources than a lack of skills. We're competent enough to run e-mail ourselves, and we've been doing it for 12 years or so for our students, but we just don't have the money or the time to keep up with what Google and Microsoft are offering. We simply can't provide 5 GB of storage to an account. Our more savvy students are already forwarding their e-mail to other services, so why not just give the students what they want in the first place?
I have my university emails all forwarded to GMail already, but I have used our web-mail systems and have found that they are not half bad. It's just that GMail is even cleaner and aggregates all my messages and calendars for me. Some of my friends (after seeing what I did) followed suite, while others still preferred to keep school and everything else separate.
I give all my thumbs Up for this.
Already done 4000 user accounts, and now doing more 44000 for all users.
Google Rocks.
About the network Connection, we have 3 data links (one radio, 2 fibre). The downtime by year is very little.
Only students will have a Google Account, all the teachers and administrative will continue using in-house solutions.
(we have to take more control, backups, logs, etc..)
We did a small survey and 80% of all users choose Highly satisfied using Google.
Microsoft is another history, you have to pay for License to have a in-house server syncing with your AD (SQL Server + MIIS)..
And if you do not want ads, have to pay (Google Education is free and you can take out the ads..)
About APIs: Google has the single-sign , easy, open, and I can choose (Java,Python,Net,etc.)
And now google has made avaliable APIs to migration and Reports, they keep evolving the product..
security: How many Security Bugs Google Apps had VS others MTAs??
I will ask them for a job or a commission there..
It would've been hunky dory, if it were possible to not have to deal with the advertisements and other crap, that supports these "free" services...
Well, if you don't care, that an outside corporation is reading/parsing all of your e-mails — without even a signed non-disclosure agreement customary in a typical outsourcing situation, then yes, it makes sense...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I know IMAP. I worked for a VERY BIG email company. You can use quotas. Use Cyrus IMAP and you can keep all the account info (including quotas) in an LDAP database so you don't need a zillion entries in /etc/passwd. If you want something Really Robust, talk to OpenWave.
You CAN force people to download their email and clear it from the server with IMAP. Like I said, you can make a school operation like this pay for itself by providing barebones service for free and charging for extra storage space.
I'm a satisfied user of Google Apps for Education. We did this transition back in August of this year for our users. We do not currently do student email through the service as there is not a good way short of the address formating to specify a student account vs a faculty or staff user. But we are going to have student email accounts next semester.
To clear up a few misconceptions:
1. Ads are turned off for our domain. Nobody will see a google ad in their email client.
2. There is POP and IMAP support just like the normal gmail accounts.
3. It is the most stable beta I've ever seen.
The reason I pushed this is that it is relatively easy and their spam and virus filtering are way better than anything we tried here. I am the only one of the four IT staff that has a serious clue as to running a successful email system and I plan on leaving soon to pursue other opportunities as they say. Gapps is easy for my boss and the other support staff to manage.
We are on connection that has not gone down for an unplanned outage since it was installed in May. Our previous connections were almost as stable with less than 10 minutes of downtime in a year.
It is speedy, it is ubiquitous, and it is cost effective. If students have privacy concerns they can learn how to forward stuff to a POP account someplace else and delete the mail from the gmail box.
Gmail doesn't even use SSL while you are reading your mail.
Sure it can, just use https://mail.google.com/ I use better gmail for firefox so even if I forget it only goes to the SSL protected site.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
As someone in a rather similar position at a small college I do see a substantial saving in time and money in these services, but I also see a lot of caveats that need to be considered. Oh, and for the record we are an all M$ shop:
Benefit 1. Federal and State Compliance. The equation is this: if we don't house the email, we don't have to deal with the legal issues of keeping it. Patriot Act archiving requirements, the implications of hacks, etc. all become someone else's problem.
Caveat 1: I would never outsource faculty or staff accounts, because of FERPA (Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act) requirements. Frankly I am not sure if I could even legally do this, because I can't ensure that the hosting service will honor the very strict requirement of the act. This means that even if we were to put this together we would still run Exchange in-house, for the few hundred accounts that remain.
Benefit 2: Academic Freedom. Is a student's email cannot be accessed by the college, then they cannot accuse us of infringing on their academic freedom. This is very important to some people, to the extent that they avoid sending certain kinds of emails through the campus system. In a lot of schools around the country, students have strange ideas that we monitor everything that they say. We don't (although I can't vouch for other schools) but you just can't tell someone this.
Caveat 2: Just because we don't do it, doesn't mean that it can't be done by the host. See Benefit/Caveat 1.
Benefit 3: Spam filtering. I don't care how much you like your spam filter, Gmail and Hotmail will probably beat it. Why? They have hundreds of billions of test cases to work their software on.
Caveat 3: Some users like a fine grained control over their spam filters, and the approach that these vendors use may not be to everyones liking. This is especially true of anyone who has ever lost an important message because of a false positive.
We use Hotmail as our e-mail provider.
.edu domain, we only have to log in once every 365 days to keep our account from being deleted, and we can forward our mail out to our real accounts.
.edu e-mail address (e.g. Facebook, back when that was still a useful service) was out of reach.
...well, it's still Hotmail. I don't know if you've used it recently, but it's not that great. Sure, having to type my password in every time (no matter how many times I click that "remember my password" checkbox) is annoying, having to click three separate links to fully log-out so I can check my old Hotmail account is annoying, and if we forget that our mail goes through Hotmail and just read it in the destination account for more than a year? Baleeted.
It's pretty much like regular Hotmail (5gigs of space), but we use the school's
The advantage is that, well, now we have an e-mail provider. A few years ago, my school didn't offer e-mail for students at all, so anything that required an
The disadvantage is
But that all pales next to the truly horrid spam filter. Far more often than not, it has flagged legitimate e-mails as spam and spam e-mails as legitimate. The only way to even KNOW that you're missing an e-mail that is stuck in spambox hell is to log in to your account. Nothing is forwarded out, and THERE'S NO WAY TO DISABLE IT COMPLETELY. So half my real e-mails get caught in the spam filter, rendering the entire account totally useless.
It may be free, but I'm not sure it's worth the price.
Don't put advice in your sig.
It would've been hunky dory, if it were possible to not have to deal with the advertisements and other crap, that supports these "free" services...
I'm not sure about Microsoft's solution, but Google Apps for Education allows you to turn off the advertisements for your students...
Who did what now?
A year ago I lost 7 or 8 years worth of email in my Hotmail account because I got married- and was too busy to check my email for 30 days. Microsoft was kind enough to allow me to reactivate my account if I wished - but the email was gone. Note, some of that email predated Microsoft owning Hotmail.
Needless to say, now I use my university's pop email server and download the emails locally - and back them up. I will never trust my personal archives to a company like that again.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
I'd have to take serious issue with a rather gross over-generalization like that. I know many universities with rather pitiful IT services and many with infrastructure that challenges those of Fortune companies. Even in my area you can look at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (a liberal arts school often cited as being one of the the best public universities in the nation overall) whose "IT" infrastructure is limited to the networked computers on campus, wireless access points around campus, their website and e-mail servers. Compare that to neighbor North Carolina State University (a large primarily engineering oriented university) whose IT department(s) (the College of Engineering has its own entire IT staff and support infrastructure) services an immense network of machines running WinXP, Solaris, RHEL and OS X, several high performance computing clusters including the 'Load Sharing Facility' (a system allowing students to execute processes distributed over the campus' computing resources), e-mail and webhosting services for the campus, a virtual computing lab for remote access to applications available on campus, free tech support for students (handles both Windows and *NIX/Mac support issues), wireless access around campus, etc, etc.
Case in point, there are many places of higher education with much more than "below average skills in handling their own IT infrastructure," and not just Ivy League universities and schools with multi-billion dollar endowments (granted, NC State just reached their first billion dollar milestone- but most of that money is being sunk into the new engineering campus being built. Centennial Campus was recently recognized as the "Top Research Science Park of the Year" by the AURP. Here's a news blurb if you're interested in reading about it.) Email is perhaps the least manpower intensive IT service for a University to provide and typically considered the most menial by IT staff (play with beowulf cluster... or set up squirrel mail... such a tough decision) and I have to question the assumption that Universities outsource it because their IT staffs aren't skilled enough to handle it themselves. This may be the case for a small minority, but most certainly not applicable to every University in the States- or outside of it.
That's what they did here in the Netherlands during the past ten or 15 years, on all school levels. We had people leave primary school who couldn't make simple sums and/or read and write. At my university more and more time has to be spent teaching first-years very basic stuff they should have learned in high school. I regulalry meet people at my university who can't spell properly 'because they are dyslectic'. Yeah right. Politics now comes to the realization that that is not good for the country. Finally...
-- Cheers!