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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."
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.
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.
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.