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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.
If I was a university president, my motto would be "Get a gmail account, bitches", then I'd be all like, "Regeants: Up my pay another $150K", then under my breath I'd be like, "bitches."
This might not be good for campuses that may experience network outages. With servers on campus, at least messages could be sent via the network rather then the internet, but now, if the internet is down, Live or Google goes down (possible for Live far-fetched though for Google) or MS (or possibly Google) decides to charge for a "premium" account that takes away features from the "free" counterpart. And also, if MS's or Google's web-mail system gets exposed to security venerabilities, it could be just as insecure as Outlook or IE.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Most of the academics I work with (professors, grad students, undergrads) already use either a regular gmail or yahoo account for their primary email address. Usually these services have better spam protection, higher storage limits, and better portability than a university email address.
I've worked IT at a College for 5 years now. We actually had a push for MS live taking over our e-mail from some of our co-workers. It has always scared me, and much prefer keeping it in house. M$ 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
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
Higher Ed. Has below average skills in handling their own IT Infrastructure.
Speak for yourself, buddy.
Fran Taylor, MIT '89
Really? Long time ago, my university used to have a strict policy about electronic transmission of things like student grades or research data...
So I wonder why these days any American Uni would want their intellecual property transmitted over google.cn routers?
The whole country going down the tubes, looks like.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
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.
I have my university emails all forwarded to GMail already, but I have used our web-mail systems and have found that they are not half bad. It's just that GMail is even cleaner and aggregates all my messages and calendars for me. Some of my friends (after seeing what I did) followed suite, while others still preferred to keep school and everything else separate.
We simply can't provide 5 GB of storage to an account.
You don't have to do that. Use IMAP with a low quota and make the students store their own mail on their own computers. You can sell extra capacity for those who prefer to store email on the server, and turn your email operation into a revenue stream.
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.
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...
Well, if you don't care, that an outside corporation is reading/parsing all of your e-mails — without even a signed non-disclosure agreement customary in a typical outsourcing situation, then yes, it makes sense...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
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 know IMAP. I worked for a VERY BIG email company. You can use quotas. Use Cyrus IMAP and you can keep all the account info (including quotas) in an LDAP database so you don't need a zillion entries in /etc/passwd. If you want something Really Robust, talk to OpenWave.
You CAN force people to download their email and clear it from the server with IMAP. Like I said, you can make a school operation like this pay for itself by providing barebones service for free and charging for extra storage space.
My school just migrated over to Google Apps, or rather is in the process of migrating. I understand that network outages, though rare, can result in email downtime, or worse, emails lost forever. This is especially bad at my school, where by policy, official communication from the university to students and vice versa is done via email and email only (this may not be at all unique; I really don't know). However, I can see one great side effect of this, and it is that, if all goes according to plan, I will be able to keep my university email address plus storage (on Google servers, true) indefinitely after I graduate. This would be a big help, as I use my university email as my main address, and it would be a big pain to have to change to another address in a year or so.
Those who anthropomorphize science and/or nature already believe in an intelligent designer.
Students should run their own e-mail systems, period. Otherwise, how can IT students prepare for their real life work in future in a realistic environment? Sure the security will not be as tight as an offsite system. But, it is educational by itself to learn how to telnet to port 25 and send a hoax e-mail from Jesus Christ or from your professor. So is catching the hoaxer by looking at the message paths or catching a student admin reading others e-mails and putting him/her to public shame. Most of all, it's a critical part of education to realize that just because you can look at other people's files does not mean you should.
If we remove the educational value of students interacting with each other and learning both skills and morals they will need to function in the outside world for the rest of their lives, we might as well outsource the whole university instead of just the e-mail system. Why not just have some good professors from India read the lecture and answer questions through online chat? Will certainly save students some money...
because colleges and universities don't use their students as a captive market? at least with gmail you don't have to buy what they are selling. A school will tell you things to buy and you'd better pay if you want the sheepskin.
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.
I'm a satisfied user of Google Apps for Education. We did this transition back in August of this year for our users. We do not currently do student email through the service as there is not a good way short of the address formating to specify a student account vs a faculty or staff user. But we are going to have student email accounts next semester.
To clear up a few misconceptions:
1. Ads are turned off for our domain. Nobody will see a google ad in their email client.
2. There is POP and IMAP support just like the normal gmail accounts.
3. It is the most stable beta I've ever seen.
The reason I pushed this is that it is relatively easy and their spam and virus filtering are way better than anything we tried here. I am the only one of the four IT staff that has a serious clue as to running a successful email system and I plan on leaving soon to pursue other opportunities as they say. Gapps is easy for my boss and the other support staff to manage.
We are on connection that has not gone down for an unplanned outage since it was installed in May. Our previous connections were almost as stable with less than 10 minutes of downtime in a year.
It is speedy, it is ubiquitous, and it is cost effective. If students have privacy concerns they can learn how to forward stuff to a POP account someplace else and delete the mail from the gmail box.
I disagree, it is entirely inappropriate for Universities to outsource their emails, since all their students' communications would then be in the hands of 3rd parties. Also Universities would be undoubtly influenced by even more corporate interests. That is definitely a step toward the wrong direction. If anything, Universities need to spend more $ on IT and hired more competent people instead of giving all the $ to the administration.
At that point we'll probably just start accepting more students from other countries to keep the classrooms full.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
Before I go any further, I'm a freshman at RIT, which is a pretty geek-heavy place I also reside on the Computer Science House, which is pretty nerdy as well. Right now we're developing a robot to bring us drinks from a networked vending machine to our room, if that helps you any. Despite our extensive use of *NIX elsewhere, we use an Exchange server for email, which works fairly well. Most students just use the web frontend for it, or just forward it to their gmail account. Myself, I use IMAP with it, but it is frequently borked, and requires the installation of a security certificate for use off-campus. That said, a lot of students here have trouble figuring out how to forward x11 traffic and a different username via ssh, much less use pine; our UNIX cluster does have it installed, but I have my doubts about how many people use it.
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.
Zippy, is that you?
YOW!! What should the entire human race DO?? Consume a fifth of CHIVAS REGAL, ski NUDE down MT. EVEREST, and have a wild SEX WEEKEND!
"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?"
Why would anybody pay extra for these wondrous 'extra' email services when gmail and everybody else already offers them for free?
In Soviet Russia your college email emails YOU! =)
Wouldn't this perfectly suit a gmail appliance? Personally, I think Gmail's interface for webmail is the best out there. I ended up biting the bullet and moving my personal domain to their free hosted services because I can't offer 5GB of email space to my friends with standard hosting, nor offer the reliability of gmail. But I still have in the back of my mind that ultimately everything is on Google's servers. They're probably better able to handle maintenance than me, but still.
They already have a search appliance. Why not a standalone email appliance that schools and businesses could install, hook it up to gobs of storage space, and there ya go? Hell, make a whole standalone Google Apps appliance, and tear Exchange a new one. You get to keep the email in-house, plus with great search, but with the Google stamp of goodness. I'd give an arm and a leg for this!
The fact of the matter is that Google can't provide 5 GB to every single one of their users either. It's all just a ploy to get people to sign up. If every user was using 5 GB, they would not have enough hard drives to hold it all. They know that most people will never use anywhere close to 5 GB. I currently have 1200 messages in GMail, and I'm only using 39 MB. I don't think I've ever deleted a message, I just mark as read, and leave them there. With good spam filtering, it's very unlikely that any student would even reach 1 GB, let alone 5 GB, especially considering that most students are only there for 4 years.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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
We use Hotmail as our e-mail provider.
.edu domain, we only have to log in once every 365 days to keep our account from being deleted, and we can forward our mail out to our real accounts.
.edu e-mail address (e.g. Facebook, back when that was still a useful service) was out of reach.
...well, it's still Hotmail. I don't know if you've used it recently, but it's not that great. Sure, having to type my password in every time (no matter how many times I click that "remember my password" checkbox) is annoying, having to click three separate links to fully log-out so I can check my old Hotmail account is annoying, and if we forget that our mail goes through Hotmail and just read it in the destination account for more than a year? Baleeted.
It's pretty much like regular Hotmail (5gigs of space), but we use the school's
The advantage is that, well, now we have an e-mail provider. A few years ago, my school didn't offer e-mail for students at all, so anything that required an
The disadvantage is
But that all pales next to the truly horrid spam filter. Far more often than not, it has flagged legitimate e-mails as spam and spam e-mails as legitimate. The only way to even KNOW that you're missing an e-mail that is stuck in spambox hell is to log in to your account. Nothing is forwarded out, and THERE'S NO WAY TO DISABLE IT COMPLETELY. So half my real e-mails get caught in the spam filter, rendering the entire account totally useless.
It may be free, but I'm not sure it's worth the price.
Don't put advice in your sig.
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?
Whether to use outsourced webmail for students or not is one issue, but categorizing "higher ed" as universally having below average skills in IT is totally wrong. I went to school at a large Big Ten institution and from my experience as both a student and as one of those "college students who needed spending cash" who worked in IT there, I have to say I was very impressed. They never had service outages, their connections were lightning fast, and the services provided were pretty much everything you needed and nothing you didn't. The in house solutions were creative and well thought out. After all, many of the "students who needed cash" IT people in college (like myself) were CS/CSE majors who actually understood the fundamentals of how systems worked, and ended up working for the very vendors that ended up making the products used when they graduated.
After I graduated, I went on to work at a large IT consulting/systems integrator that worked in the business/government space. I have to say that in my professional life I have run into many more "business" IT managers or workers who fit the "below average skills" category than I ever met in college. The decisions made in business IT just make me cringe compared to what I saw at my University. There is much more cost cutting "to make me look good to my boss" in spite of the quality and robustness of solutions, much more reliance on vendors who run rampant pursuing their own goals of lock-in rather than coming up with sensible solutions for their customers, and to be quite honest, a much lower bar for hiring IT staff. Lets face it, its not all that hard to get a job as an IT person in business. You really just have to have an MCSE.
The other thing you might not want to forget is things like LDAP and Kerberos, distributed file systems, cryptography, and in some cases operating systems themselves came out of technology created in University IT labs.
Huh? I work in higher ed. We have a multi-server, clustered email system hooked up to a fibre channel SAN. Same for file storage. It takes far less than a full-time person to manage either. We've only got a couple of admins to handle the other 60 or so servers - mostly Windows and Linux app servers, some physical, many virtual. We've been using VMware ESX server for more than three years. Oh, yeah, and our IT spending and staffing levels are below average for schools our size. Higher ed pays substantially less than retail for enterprise hardware and software. And I know a lot of folks working in higher ed who are doing similar work.
Offering services doesn't have to be hugely labor intensive, or expensive, if the system is designed well to start.
A year ago I lost 7 or 8 years worth of email in my Hotmail account because I got married- and was too busy to check my email for 30 days. Microsoft was kind enough to allow me to reactivate my account if I wished - but the email was gone. Note, some of that email predated Microsoft owning Hotmail.
Needless to say, now I use my university's pop email server and download the emails locally - and back them up. I will never trust my personal archives to a company like that again.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
I'd have to take serious issue with a rather gross over-generalization like that. I know many universities with rather pitiful IT services and many with infrastructure that challenges those of Fortune companies. Even in my area you can look at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (a liberal arts school often cited as being one of the the best public universities in the nation overall) whose "IT" infrastructure is limited to the networked computers on campus, wireless access points around campus, their website and e-mail servers. Compare that to neighbor North Carolina State University (a large primarily engineering oriented university) whose IT department(s) (the College of Engineering has its own entire IT staff and support infrastructure) services an immense network of machines running WinXP, Solaris, RHEL and OS X, several high performance computing clusters including the 'Load Sharing Facility' (a system allowing students to execute processes distributed over the campus' computing resources), e-mail and webhosting services for the campus, a virtual computing lab for remote access to applications available on campus, free tech support for students (handles both Windows and *NIX/Mac support issues), wireless access around campus, etc, etc.
Case in point, there are many places of higher education with much more than "below average skills in handling their own IT infrastructure," and not just Ivy League universities and schools with multi-billion dollar endowments (granted, NC State just reached their first billion dollar milestone- but most of that money is being sunk into the new engineering campus being built. Centennial Campus was recently recognized as the "Top Research Science Park of the Year" by the AURP. Here's a news blurb if you're interested in reading about it.) Email is perhaps the least manpower intensive IT service for a University to provide and typically considered the most menial by IT staff (play with beowulf cluster... or set up squirrel mail... such a tough decision) and I have to question the assumption that Universities outsource it because their IT staffs aren't skilled enough to handle it themselves. This may be the case for a small minority, but most certainly not applicable to every University in the States- or outside of it.
"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
That's what they did here in the Netherlands during the past ten or 15 years, on all school levels. We had people leave primary school who couldn't make simple sums and/or read and write. At my university more and more time has to be spent teaching first-years very basic stuff they should have learned in high school. I regulalry meet people at my university who can't spell properly 'because they are dyslectic'. Yeah right. Politics now comes to the realization that that is not good for the country. Finally...
-- Cheers!
Maybe if y'all would stop plugging in Linksys wireless access points which think they know better than our DHCP servers, asking for access to data on a server that's been turned off for six months and installing viruses via the no-click virus installation engine (formerly known as Internet Explorer 6) then we could get on with fixing the infrastructure instead of firefighing the whole damn time.
Just sayin', that's all.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
"... is also denying the student the choice of maintaining their privacy."
Ah... don't use it? Or just use it for whatever campus-specific courseware that requires it.
But seriously, any student who thinks their email is private (third-party or not) is in serious denial. Heck, just connecting to the school's network pretty much compromises any non-encrypted request or transmission...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
"Their budget is usually enough for one good manager and a bunch of college students who need spending cash."
Colleges should have all the freaking cash they need to staff one hell of an IT department. I am sure that $40,000 a year for 4-5 years on average per student has to go to something. Where is all this money going?
Wait, I forgot, they have to pay the football coach. My bad.
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.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran