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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
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.
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.
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
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?"
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.
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?