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Choosing a Replacement Email System For a University?
SmarkWoW writes "The university I attend is currently looking to change the way in which is provides its students with an email service. In the past they used a legacy mail system which can no longer fit their needs. A committee has narrowed the possibilities down to three vendors: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Representatives from these three vendors will be coming to our college and giving a presentation on the advantages of their systems. We're looking at other services these companies provide such as calendaring and integration with existing software that our university runs. What questions would Slashdot readers ask during these Q&A sessions? Which of these three companies would you recommend? Why? What advantages would each have that college-level students would take advantage of? What other aspects should we consider when making our decision?"
Hi there
first how do I backup the system ?
( what your really asking is if your software system fails and it will all systems fail (e.g. gmail outage for a day) how quickly can I recover?)
we get attacked by a certain type of worm can I insert a rule into everyones policy to get rid of that ?
(its been delivered the filters did not catch it I want to reach in and take it away)
how do i get a log and bodies of the email sent out of the system for legal ?
how do I control the sending policy ?
(I dont want just anyone sending mail on behalf of my domain some people i want to restrict to only email inside the domain )
how can I add all the address's before people arrive ?
how does it work with mobiles ?
there's a start
regards
john jones
http://www.johnjones.me.uk
disclaimer : I work in groupware but for a different vender my blog reflects this
If the university requires/forces students to use their .edu email account, then I feel that having the hardware and service on-site is a bare minimum. A lot of private information can _sometimes_ be required. So the organization requiring the use of the email account should be directly responsible as much as possible.
On a side note have secure SMTP and IMAP is a big deal for me. I know Microsoft tends not to offer IMAP support for their new, Live (offsite) service. So Microsoft's Live Mail service has two big NO-NOs for me.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The most important : support both POPS and IMAPS, as well as SMTPS.
There is no reason not supporting this in any system deployed in the 90's or later.
A good webmail such as gmail (and not like outlook web access) is also worth considering.
My university switched to Google last year, and it's been amazing. Each student's course schedule is automatically added to their course calendar, and profs can add due dates, special events, etc. in a few clicks. Your point about Google Apps is a good one as well - I've found it much easier to do group projects or test reviews when I can create a Google Doc and share it out to classmates. At my job with the university IT deparment, we use Google Sites to keep our information coordinated. The whole system has proven amazingly useful.
Yahoo started offering perpetual licenses in response to the Zimbra scare. Zimbra is also open-source, but you have to pay for the Outlook, iCal, and Mobile connectors.
It's easily one of the best collaboration packages with a few loose ends. Don't equate Zimbra with Yahoo just because Yahoo has lost its touch. I don't think Zimbra has lost its touch.
I fully agree, I think out of the choices, Zimbra has to most usable interface and some nifty tricks. With outlook and blackberry/activesync connectors this would fully replace Exchange. And if you hear about grumble (as I heard happened at my university when they picked sun's JES email system) about public folders and such, tell them to use Sharepoint instead. (not much better but you keep the crap features in crappy software ;0p)
Exchange is great. No jokin'. If you have the right staff, who don't treat it like an SMTP engine and IMAP4 - then kick it when it doesn't behave that way.
The problem for a U is that you have the population of a large corp - but 80% turnover, every 3 months! That is an issue in provisioning/de-provisioning and self-service management that AD and Exchange have a tough time with. They are capable - but there's no tool, yet. If you have to pony up for the (now beta) Identity Lifecycle Manager v2, you may no longer be in competitive territory - 'tho the solution is fantastic. Accounts can be provisioned by the same process and personnel that hand out student ID and mealcards!
So, I believe that Google is nothing but a life of frustration - and in five years, when you see you've helped to build a monster that will make you wish for the good 'ol days of MS Monopoly? No thanks! Still there's the business case, and it isn't that great. The UI is good for webmail. Whoopie! No calendar / scheduling worth snot.
Yahoo! is compelling with the acquisition of Zimbra. Zimbra is amazing Ajax. Don't build your own - it is as nonstandard as you can make postfix/courier, and very intolerant of customising the backend. Instead, license Zimbra as a service, elastically as needed. Downside? Is Yahoo! still with us in 9 mos? Yang turned down Ballmers' USD 38/share, and last I looked today, they were trading at USD 11 and going down, while the CFO is looking to bypass the nominal severance minimums demanded by California for their mass bloodletting.
MS is beginning to license Exchange as a service online. It's good today, and prolly great tomorrow. Look into that - I think the real advantages happen once the number of users approaches 15K. It's an elastic service, and they do SharePoint integrated portal, too.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The Microsoft solution is probably Live@Edu (http://get.liveatedu.com/Education/Connect/) which does do all those things.
You were by far not the largest Cyrus installation. There are several installations with over 100K users. Cyrus is designed to scale horizontally (multiple small servers, each serving a portion of the users) rather than vertically (using very large servers to serve large numbers of users). The places which have the biggest problems with Cyrus tend to be those that run tens of thousands of users per server. Cyrus is far from perfect, but it can readily scale to very large installations.
Exchange is awful, in terms of backup, mailing list handling, and account handling. It's also only properly available for Microsoft Outlook: nothing else provides the same set of festures. The only selling point for Exchange is its integrated calendar function, and _that_ sells a lot of software. For examples of missing features, pull up their web client and try to select all the messages on a page for deletion or transfer to another folder.
Google has been pretty stable, and knows how to make good, consistent, simple interfaces that work _anywhere_. They have some issues with the idea that all email should be saved forever, and their IMAP client does not allow you to select which mailboxes you want to see or not. This leads to a problem with the 'All Mail' group, which they really need to correct. But if you accept those limitations, it just works, for everyone, not just for Outlook users.
Yahoo seems interesting, with Zimbra available. But I agree with your stability concern for the company. Yahoo has basically lost the web search engine game, and their online services are trailing Google significantly, and they've just wasted a lot of time with at Microsoft takeover bid.