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?"
We use a combination of Squirrelmail and some homebrew imap and smtp servers, which ultimately are going to be tied in to a Shibboleth SSO solution.
Most of our systems are homebrew and rely on cron jobs to update the AD (or the mysql db with an AD dump .. i'm not sure which way round it goes these days)
If you've always used out of the box software then outsourcing your services is probably the best idea, even if it would be more cost-effective to hire a couple of beardy unwashed hackers for a few months to put something together and keep one on for long term support.
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
I work for a small-ish university in Canada and we run our own mail systems. With the proper software and expertise it's not that difficult to do.
Is there some reason that you're looking at external vendors? Not enough staff? Not enough internal expertise with email? Cost? Something else?
If you did decide to host it yourself, you could go the traditional route with a Unix-based mailserver, and something like Horde's IMP for Webmail. Or you could look at something like Zimbra, which has all your mail basics plus extra goodness like calendaring built-in.
As for who I would go with from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft - as a former sysadmin I would avoid Microsoft. This isn't because I'm some kind of Unix bigot - it's because in my experience they tend to oversell the capabilities of their products ... the true limitations of which you discover after the deal has been signed.
That may have just been the reps we had back in Ottawa, but YMMV.
Everyone hates it because of cost and bashing, but whatever. Throw in exchange 2003+, and let the students use outlook or webmail. Get the whole calendar thing together, and you can share them, etc. Plus, it's established software, plenty of support around if you need it.
Google, because then your students and teachers can use Google Apps instead of whatever they're using now to submit and share documents.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
"Can support" is terribly far from "is supporting."
I work at the ITEE school at my uni, and our tech section was running Horde for our email server. It was superb. Alas, orders came from above that they wished to centralise the email servers and we got stuck on Exchange. It's crap compared to what we had. The web client is rubbish, and the mail server is dog slow.
I'd go with the above suggestion if you have the choice. Second choice, I'd probably recommend Google.
I intend to live forever, or die trying. - Groucho Marx
If you go with Google, make sure their proposal has phone support for administrative accounts. Their service is wonderful, their support wanks. And I'd stand on that. No support, no deal. Which ever one you go with, make sure you have an exit strategy in writing. How they're going to help you transition, including message migration, if the relationship sours. I expect Google to have a good option there, don't know about the other two.
Half your students are probably already using Gmail anyway.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Until this fall, our university was maintaining one of, if not the largest, Cyrus mail system in the world. Over 50,000 mailboxes generating an average of 4,000,000 transactions a day (peaking at 5,000,000), hosted on a cluster of SunFire servers and StorEdge/StorageTek SAN. In-house, open-source...sounds great, right?
This year we estimated the cost of increasing our default inbox quota from a paltry 60 MB to 1 GB (a long-overdue upgrade). The total came in at about US$500,000, which is fiscally untenable at this point.
Then we were hit by a previously unknown ZFS bug that crippled mail delivery for almost a week while we worked with Carnegie Mellon, Sun and consultants trying to figure out why our system wasn't scaling properly.
We realized that sometimes outsourcing is the best alternative, no matter what in-house resources or requirements exist.
We just launched Google-hosted email for all students, which is projected to save $250,000 annually (or more if TCO is considered).
It was fun being the guinea-pig for scaling up Cyrus, but by partnering with Google we can deliver more reliable, larger inboxes and save money instead of spending it. DIY "let the CS department handle it" philosophies are great, but not always the best plan. Even for email, outsourcing can sometimes be the best option, not a cop out.
My school did just that somewhat with our registration system. As well as our mail system was Exchange and grew too large, I am assuming disk space was the problem just maintaining. They dumped it for google mail. As far as the registration system, it got hammered at the beginning of every semester with 30K+ people registering. So they dumped it for some People Soft portal type system (????). While the UI is marginally better, I don't find it any more confusing than the home brew stuff, but it seemed to handle the load better at least for this past semester beginning.
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
Zimbra works very well, if your not looking to outsource. (ask the Yahoo guys about it)
It can be run as a domain controller itself using OpenLDAP and Samba to do account authentication, and there are modules in Zimbra to allow it to do that.. So while you are replacing your mail server you can take the PDC out with it. :p
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
Honestly, the ability to tie Exchange into your PBX seamlessly and reply to email from your phone, and check your voicemails from your email is pretty nifty.
That being said, Zimbra is damned impressive.
Gmail would be the simplest solution.
Creighton University just switched to it.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I work at a mid-sized community college. We are in the process of migrating our calendars, chat, and email to google (from iplanet/luminous). So far it is very promising and best of all basically free.
Not to mention our servers no longer get hit with incoming spam and we do not need to maintain a antivirus server to scan incoming email. Going exchange was way overboard cost wise, and going with zimbra proved to be MORE costly then exchange (go figure). Our requirements were to be able to use outlook for people who want to, have a great web UI, be usable from pda's, iphones, and other smart devices, and integrate well with our current web portal. Google met all those goals with easy.
I hope that Yahoo will push for a Zimbra implementation when they show up - it's not clear from your query, but I hope that we're not talking about just the fee-based versions of the web offerings from these three outfits.
Zimbra is full-featured - mail, calendaring, presence, and more; including things that college kids would take advantage of: mobile options. It's also extensible and flexible enough that it can be tied into many existing and disparate backend systems:
-tie it into your admissions or financials database and give administrators more flexibiltiy in processing paperwork
-tie it into twitter and facebook and other web2.0ey things to make the college kids share stuff easily
-tie it into stuff like Blackboard or whatever edcational software they use, so that kids can easily share (drag and drop) files from/to their classmates and teachers.
Oh, and it's pretty much standards-based, so if you decide later to move to something else, there's not really the issue of lock-in. How would you export your data from Gmail or the others if you had to move a few years down the road?
Other random questions: If these are to be hosted by the provider rather than by your school, do you have assurance that they won't datamine you to serve ads or other such tomfoolery? How long will they retain your data if you change providers? As for protection of the innocent, will they sell you out at the drop of an unsubstantiated dcma notice? If your grad students email each other about some new groundbreaking project they're working on, will it screw up their potential to file a patent later? Who "owns" the content of the messages?
That's my 2 cents. Please post back and let us know what they end up deciding on.
Half a mil ? Really ? Let's see.
50,000 mailboxes, 1 GB each, let's overestimate and multiply this by 4 (2x for raid mirroring, 2x for a disk-based backup on a raid mirror), so you need about 200 TB of raw storage. 192 TB can be provided by 4 Thumpers (Sun Fire x4500, 4 rack units) with 48 1-TB disks each (pretty soon Sun will offer 1.5-TB disks), and the 4 of them fit in only 16 rack units.
Assuming you are getting ripped off by Sun, let's overestimate again and say you pay $1200/TB (raw disks are 10 TIMES cheaper: $120/TB). That's 192*1200 = $230k.
A Thumper is rated 1800W max, let's overestimate and say it actually does consume 1800W continuously and let's say you also waste 1800W on the A/C to cool 1 Thumper. So running and cooling the 4 Thumpers consumes 1800*2*4 = 14.4kW. At $.01kWh, running them 24/7 for 5 years would cost you 14.4*24*365.25*5*.01 = $6300.
Despite all this overestimations, the grand total is $230k + $6300 = $236k.
Half a mil you said ? I just saved you $500k-$236k = $264k :)
I work for them as a contractor and that's why I'm posting anonymously. I have not worked directly with the new Microsoft-based email system but my work for the technology center brought me into contact with it recently.
I learned that the interface looks different, with different options & different features depending on which browser you use. It only works as advertised in IE6. It literally has a different interface for several different browsers. They are so different that some of us expect in increase in the support burden at the help center because of users using the same email system, but at a different browser, because the interface varies that much. Mac users on campus are going to be very disappointed (surprised?), but the sad part is, the team that bought the MS product were specifically looking for an email solution that would help out the increasing numbers of Mac users here.
There isn't any question you can ask, I feel, because they would just lie to you, too, just as they apparently lied to people here at this university. What you could do is ask for a list of some customers, or, even better, do some web searching yourself to see which US universities recently rolled out a new student email system, and call them. MS would likely only give you names of customers they know would give a glowing review, as would anyone, I guess.
Good luck. I wish I could tell you more. Find out who rolled out student email in the past few weeks from this date, and call several people there. The lower their position, the better. Higher-ups might be more likely to put a positive spin on the MS choice. I don't know. But a person who has to work in the trenches could tell you what they think.
I'll agree with one caveat: CS will do THEIR OWN IT very right - they often just don't feel like meddling with everyone else's.
For example, I went to Clemson University(graduated 2003), with a unique perspective - I majored in CS but worked as a student worker for the IT department of the College of Business and Behavioral Sciences. Our IT department coordinated with the overall campus IT to deliver a workable network for the students and regular faculty - Novell Netware on the backend with all Windows machines on the frontend. Microsoft Office, , MatLAB, etc. All stuff that your average home user might want because it's what they knew, and what worked easiest with the outside world. All of which was the opposite of what the CS department wants, which is typically, as mentioned, research tools.
So in my case the CS department effectively sectioned itself off entirely. Solaris machines on the desktop and the backend with an available Oracle server, Sun's compilers (gcc was installed too but wasn't the default compiler), etc. They even maintained their own separate email system for all CS majors and faculty (Postfix based - everyone had shell accounts that they could access via SSH remotely and could check their mail via pine, mutt, or any other of many installed programs). Now they too had their own dedicated staff to maintain this network (though several key members of that staff also taught a few classes, but usually on things like Intro to Unix or Network Administration rather than the more abstract classes), but it was all internally maintained.
Basically my point is that even though the CS department probably isn't interested in doing IT for the whole campus, a lot of times they'll maintain their own because a) a "mainstream" IT department isn't going to provide the type of environment they need, and b) they, and usually their students, are adaptable enough that they can stray off the beaten path quite a bit without much trouble. And honestly, though I'd say it was probably more a matter of the software they used rather than their staff competence, I'll say that the CS systems that I used virtually never gave even a hint of trouble. It was a well oiled machine. The Windows machines on the main network weren't nearly as well behaved.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Checking voicemail from email or replying to email from your phone are *not* features that you need Exchange to get. They aren't even things Exchange did first or particularly well. It's just a popular solution that other vendors (like PBX providers) advertise compatibility with, nothing more, nothing less.
And Exchange is a nasty solution if you're not using an MS OS -- the IMAP client on your phone won't work unless someone enables it. Even if they enable IMAP doesn't work terribly well when mixed with MAPI clients or OWA. And OWA from Exchange 2007 hides about half the features (like rules and filters) if you're not browsing from MSIE. For an environment like a University, where a good 50+% of the users are likely *not* provided with a copy of Outlook (or an OS that can run it), let alone phones that support ActiveSync, it's probably not a great plan.
Yes, exchange is awful.
As far as your Google IMAP problem, it can be solved by using a desktop email program such as Thunderbird, Evolution or even, dare I say it, Outlook. Oh, wait, on LifeHacker now I see that Google has just rolled out IMAP folder selection! That problem's solved now.
What we do is have a Google Apps account with mail, calendar, and docs, and integrate with a company Drupal site (except mail. it was very simple). Works like a charm. There was something featured on Slashdot over the past couple weeks that was an FOSS drop-in Exchange replacement. You might could look at that. I don't remember the name of it sorry (and it may have been on Wired, not Slashdot, but I distinctly remember the Slashdot Linux 'Dont fear the penguin' logo)
I have actual, direct experience with doing this at 2 different colleges. One used Google, the other used Microsoft. Google worked without a hitch and we had good, quick support and responses when asking questions. However, Google saw fit to remove some of the admin capabilities we felt we needed over our own student accounts, and refused to return them. Microsoft, at the other college, got an IP address change from us several months ago for our outbound bulk mailer for student information mailings. For some reason, they decided to update that in only one place, their firewalls I believe. It didn't get updated in their spam filter, and when we recently initiated some standard bulk email, their spam filter went nuts and blacklisted us! All outbound mail from faculty to students quit working! When we tried to get support, they indicated that the IP address we were using was a new one, and that it would take 5 days to get it into their systems..... we had to get this escalated by execs at our end, with copies of the email notifications to them from months ago. They finally agreed that it was a lapse on their part, but we still had 2 full days of downtime. So, if I were you, I would ask about an SLA, and about the administrative capabilities you feel you need to provide the level of service you wish for your students. On a side note, no way I'd go with Yahoo. If I had my druthers, I'd move the current Microsoft setup to Google, because Google escalation works much better.