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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.
Working for a university, I'd say that our Internet connection goes down less often than our infrastructure goes down, even though that's usually local to an area or building on campus (temporary bridge loop, etc). And even if the University connection to the Internet is down, students can still go off-campus to get email (coffee shop, etc). The "Internet", or a pipe towards some Gmail server somewhere, being completely down is a rare occasion.
Privacy is our biggest issue with the Gmail for students pilot program. No ads, sure, but mail is still being bot-scanned and some of it is sensitive information which, by policy, is not to be allowed off the campus infrastructure. Those are the hurdles we're working around with Google.