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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?"
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.
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.
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.
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'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
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)