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.

Comments

A fucking bad Idea.

[drolli]

Especially for google. Why? Not because i think the concerncs about privacy etc. could not be settled legally in a binding way or because of the loss e-mail when the college looses connectivity. Just for a very simple reason: in recent times, if something can be done via google, responsibles turn their head to autopilot and stop thinking. And while for most of the users outsourced mail is ok, i would think that some, e.g. the Network administrators, an the board of the Institution need internal e-mail, as well as Hospitals connected to the Unioversity (In Germany these exist). No try to explain such things to somebody whose head was just turned off. The qustion: "Why cant we use gmail?" could be difficult to explain in this case.

Re:Takes a load off IT.

[T-Bone-T]

I hope you were joking. What I understood was "blah blah blah Linux blah blah(IMAP) blah blah blah blah blah email blah blah blah blah spam-ridden blah blah blah."