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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
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..
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.
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?