Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.