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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.
This might not be good for campuses that may experience network outages. With servers on campus, at least messages could be sent via the network rather then the internet, but now, if the internet is down, Live or Google goes down (possible for Live far-fetched though for Google) or MS (or possibly Google) decides to charge for a "premium" account that takes away features from the "free" counterpart. And also, if MS's or Google's web-mail system gets exposed to security venerabilities, it could be just as insecure as Outlook or IE.
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Their budget is usually enough for one good manager and a bunch of college students who need spending cash.
:)
Well, that's not entirely true but IT in Higher Ed certainly does not function like it does everywhere else and hosted solutions (of any application genre) are going great guns in Higher Ed because of the slow response times with IT.
It's a serious cash cow for the companies that host these services (like RightNow and TimeTrade to name just two of the dozen that I have dealt with as part of my job in the last 6 months) because Higher Ed is so willing to slough this stuff off on someone else and pay the maintenance fees rather than having to rely on the overworked in-house IT staff.
The unfortunate part of having a hosted solution is the maintenance fees. With a hosted CRM solution requiring an 8% yearly fee to keep up with upgrades and hosting/service fees, college budgets are dwindling for the departments that rely on this software for day-to-day activities.
The biggest problem will come in ~2014 as the enrollment decline hits the big time and colleges are scrambling to spend more of their limited budgets on marketing to their high-quality leads and keeping up with all the budgets of those higher-end schools. It should be interesting
Well it is true depending on the college... The point is that there are a few good IT Professionals and a bunch of students who think they know it all but don't understand that working in IT isn't all about just getting the computer to work. The issue of Paying say the maintenance fee vs. keeping a full staff is often cheaper when you figure out everything. First when there is a problem you can rather quickly get an experience or at least trained person to look and resolve the problem in a couple hours vs. Having some hourly wage guy spending days while higher ups are breathing down the necks to get it working. Also there is an issue of budgeting having a fixed budget for the year is better then needing to ask for emergency cash. Colleges have far more wast effecting the departments then an IT Budget that some strategic maintenance contracts. Mostly because every year they need to spend their entire budget just so they will have it for the next year, causing some department to be strapped for cash but for other who don't need it for that year but the next to go hog wild and wast as much as possible so they can get more the next year.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
My university is in the process of switching to GMail. The old home-grown system was abysmal at best, but I was simply forwarding all e-mails to my private address and never worried about it. With that system about to be shut down next week, I set up the GMail account I am forced to get today - and I find it really troubling that I had to do so. All I want is to forward my e-mail to my private address again. I have absolutely no interest in Google's services, in their Spam filtering or nifty webmail interface. GMail does offer forwarding. I enabled it and expect never to never in my life visit GMail's site again. But before getting this far, I had to accept Google's terms of service and privacy policy.
I am forced to use the college e-mail address for some administrative stuff. How is it reasonable that this also forces me to accept some third party's terms and rules? If I *wanted* GMail's services, then it is fair game that I would have to accept their terms. But if all I want to do is forward my e-mails and get them off the service as fast as possible, there should be a shortcut way that routes the e-mails around Google's servers, prohibiting Google from having a peek inside. College has picked a third party here and is forcing me to enter into a contract with them. This isn't right.
Apparently we looked at it for the University I work at here in Canada but the administration rejected it out of hand. Everyone loved the technical aspects of GMail - the problem was that it was run by a US company. This means that the US government has the ability to force emails to be handed over which, in almost all circumstances, would be a violation of Canadian privacy laws thus leaving the university in very hot water.
Given some of the recent claims from Mr. Bush and co. even having the servers located in Canada would not be sufficient protection as long as it was a US company owning them. So, despite Google's excellent technical product and general trustworthiness, I don't see many countries where there are any sort of privacy laws being able to sensibly use it. In fact the university are very uncomfortable with faculty using personal GMail accounts for exactly the same reason.
"as schools grapple with entering freshmens' already entrenched online habits." Since when has this been a problem, let alone a priority for schools? Did schools somehow become democracies that care what the students previous habits were in things like email? How does it teach them anything, if they don't expose them to different environments and conditions that don't conform to what they do in their bedrooms at home? What will happen to them in the corporate world, or military world, or just about any workplace that has a modicum of technology "to deal with?"
I worked at a higher ed institution and supported a network of about a dozen or so other higher ed institutions, and saw what was going on. This just wasn't the case at all. The problem all of them had was management buy-in for solutions. They all had IT professionals who in many cases out-classed their private sector counterparts, who had no problem running email servers which could both block spam and hold up to heavy usage. Their problem, really, was that management usually wouldn't support something they didn't understand, and believed anything printed on an 8x10 glossy.
So, email servers with nearly perfect track records were replaced with exchange servers and all the broken functionality/features therein. Upgrading network equipment, managing a network (WAN and LAN), inventorying a cable plant, securing web servers (MS salesbots also assured many of the PHBs IIS was already secure), and a host of other initiatives that IT staff tried to do at a number of institutions got little to no support/buyin from management. Which at least at those institutions the move to yahoo mail, gmail, and hotmail amongst staff and students became widespread.
From what I could tell, the real problem wasn't a lack of skill in the IT staff, but a lack of support starting at the top of most institutions I saw.
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