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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.
Lets face it. Higher Ed. Has below average skills in handling their own IT Infrastructure. Their budget is usually enough for one good manager and a bunch of college students who need spending cash. Keeping an email system up an running with blocking Spam is a lot of work normally way above what normal College IT have the skills or resources to do. So Google and Microsoft Live want more email users. So I say let them have it. Just modify the domain name to allow college.edu emails to go to the gmail account and things are all hunky dory. I work for a small business and I have been slowly outsourcing our email to GMAIL its free and it is easier and less work and expense on our end.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Speaking as one of those alleged incompetent educational IT directors, I'm not seeing a lot of value in this. Email costs us next to nothing now. Let's see, I have 40,000 active accounts now on one server, using Cyrus, dspam, clam-av, and policyd. All the software is free so the cost is basically a new server every three years and some storage space on the SAN (email is a very small portion of space on the SAN so freeing it up won't buy us much).
Yeah, if I had an Exchange farm and a dedicated staff to manage it, then outsourcing it would be enticing. As it is now, it'd be more work to figure out how to migrate people away from a tried-and-true solution as well as the privacy and FERPA issues than it is to let it ride as is, and if people do something stupid like delete a folder, we can easily restore it from backup in short order.
In-house also means being able to use a single-sign on solution for all campus services. Same ID, sign in once using CAS (Central Auth Service -- another freebie package)
(We do provide an interface for users to forward their emails to their preferred provider. No one is forcing them to use us.)
Now what I would like to do is outsource shared calendaring service with seamless syncing to a plethora of mobile devices. That's a need that hasn't been adequately addressed in-house. ie, before fixing stuff that's not broken, how about helping with services that fix what *is* broken!
btw, news flash, people under 20 don't use email much anyway. It's basically the tool of "old people." Email is busted in many ways and will probably die as a platform in the future anyway. I say let it ride as is until then.
Now get off my lawn.
What about a record of every email they sent in college. Every threat to a competing lover, every breakup, every plan to falsify grades.
The nice thing about email on a schools server is that the mail is presumably gone when the student leaves college. OTOH, google promises to keep a copy of everything ever created on it's server.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I go to Arizona State University. This is EXACTLY what has happened here.
Trinity College, Dublin is switching completely to GMail mid next week. So much for European universities protecting their students from corporate interests.
Wow, angry much? Ever heard of a laugh?
You are so right. Really, the only way to measure a person's worth is to do a Google search on what you think is their name.
I don't see the words "typical" or "average" in what I quoted. You've fabricated "meaning in average in aggregate..." on your own.
I was also an MIT employee for a year, and MIT paid me back ALL that I paid to them in four years.
True story: my boss and I were messing with the web cams on our spiffy SGI workstations very late one night. After maybe two or three minutes, there was a LOUD knock on the door. It was a guy from MIT Networking, from the other end of campus, complaining that the subnet mask on one of the machines was not set right.
"Anonymous Coward" pretty well sums it up.
The idea of providing these services "for free" is laughable. Google's business is advertising. What is more valuable to Google than knowing every online activity for a demographic like "recent college graduates"? If Google would like to have access to that data, the Universities should be selling it to Google for what it's worth -- presumably much more than it costs to provide email. Of course, maybe members of the University communities wouldn't like to have their personal information auctioned off to the highest bidder.
:w
"Use IMAP with a low quota and make the students store their own mail on their own computers."
Why give email addresses to students at all now?
Back when I was in college in the 90's, it made sense for colleges to give students an email address, because in the early to mid 90's, Internet usage still wasn't widespread. Email was a strange and foreign novelty to most then. My first email address was supplied by my school, and I had to physically go to the computer lab to access my mail on a green or orange colored dumb terminal with text-only displays (hey, that was actually fun, though).
Now, the Internet is everywhere, and just about everyone has several email addresses, most of them from free services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or Hotmail. Why give a kid yet another email address to keep track of, one that will be taken away from them after graduation?
Why not just require a student to supply an email address when they first arrive, and use that? Then it stays in the admin records, and whenever a new class roster is created each semester, each instructor/grad assistant/professor will be supplied with their students' email addresses along with names, phone numbers, etc.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Just because bandwidth is cheaper doesn't mean that its suddenly a good idea to access everything over the WAN when its not really necessary. Hosting email servers isn't that hard. People spend more time worrying about how they can save $10 by switching to a webmail service hosted by a third party than they would spend if they just got off their ass and implemented a proper mail environment.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!