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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?"
Are you from Microsoft? Yes? Well thank you for your time.
~ Ron Fitzgerald
Google: least harm
microsoft: most lock-in
Yahoo!: possible lock-in
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Verizon. I hear they do wonders when it comes to email security.
Make Sure the Calendar system also Verifies that there are no overlapping so that way a student can get a copy of their Class Schedule. Another thing that would be nice is to see what kind of programing APIs they offer for you to allow the Staff/Students to add links to things for specific classes like notes/MP3 recordings/Handouts, and allow them to future proof their systems.
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
Questions that are tailored to your specific needs. Things about ease of administration, scaling, storage space, etc. I don't see that there are any general questions to be asked that aren't painfully obvious. The questioner didn't even specify whether the software was running on their own servers or on Yagoosoft's servers (I'm guessing the latter, since I haven't heard of a yahoo on-site solution). In the end, only you know what's most important to the university and, therefore, the things you need to ask about.
You may end up w/ an in-house system.
Let your CS dept run it.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
If your university is going to dump a load of cash on a different company to manage and maintain the system, they should instead drop the cash on their own employees to do the same
Use the Horde project.
...a legacy mail system which can no longer fit their needs.
I can see where this is going already. Enjoy your Exchange server farm.
Protip: Don't let your IT department work with anything sharp. That way they can't kill themselves.
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
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.
I've used Yahoo mail since pretty much day one since they have offered it. Needless to say, I get close to 50k spam messages a day. If my primary inbox (after sorting and spam filtering) gets over about 20k messages, the whole systems dies. I get error message after error message "An error has occurred. A technician will be notified.". Then maybe a day later I can actually log back into my mail and use it. But the problem comes back... and it has been this way for as long as I can remember.
I also have mail in my archives that goes back to 1997. If I access any of these, same problem as above. Be wary.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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
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.
... Exchange is actually a great product in my opinion. Though some clever soul will certainly point out that my opinion is of no value and should receive no attention.
I would be be asking either of these rep's is what service integrates best with your existing student directory service(AD, OpenLDAP eDirectory etc), and how do they go about managing mass account creation, recipient policies, group membership.
Its one thing to bring in a new mail service, but ongoing management and maintenance of users and mailboxes, it and how it interacts with other internal systems would be the most important thing to me from an administrative point of view.
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.
I would be sure to ask what the process is to migrate your existing email infrastructure over the new vendors' respective systems. This includes mailboxes, distribution groups, etc. Make sure there is an import utility, and if not... ask them to make one (assuming that this is a big enough purchase, the vendors should do this for little to no cost). Other than that, I'd be sure to ask the obvious ones like reliability, compatibility with spam filters/policies, stuff like that.
I would be concerned about the privacy implications of using Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, or GMail for your student and faculty email. Now, granted, a lot of college students will be using one of those three for their personal email accounts *anyhow*, but for faculty in particular, and even some students, there could be some real downsides to using a third-party email provider.
For example, I don't know what Uni you're from, but a lot of Universities have faculty and students who are involved in research which might be of a nature where it might not be good to have them sending emails through a third-party. For example, professors and/or students working on Defense dept, Energy department, or CIA/NSA research (although, it might be that in such a situation, they would be using a more secure email system run by the government agency they are collaborating with, instead of the University email, anyhow, so maybe that's not such a concern).
Still, in general, I don't like the privacy implications of using Yahoo, Microsoft, or GMail for university email systems.
You might ask the representatives what guarantees of privacy they are willing to make to the University and it's students, faculty, and staff. I think I would hold them to a higher standard than what the normal Yahoo, MSN, or Gmail privacy statements offer.
I certainly hope you are not leaving the students out of the loop, for they are your customers after all. Let them know what is on the table and discuss it with them. Their input could be valuable in many unseen ways.
The university I am attending here in the US is using gmail, but it is renamed and using a .edu address. I like it much better than other accounts I have had from other providers (Yahoo, MS, ect). It is much easier to filter/manipulate/read than the others, and also better at filtering spam. 99.9% of the spam I have gotten is from the school and always labeled "IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT" in the subject (I'm looking at YOU, ETSU, for spamming crap that is not important to students). Anything with those two words goes straight to the shit pile...
"This is America... where the will of the few outweigh the outrage of the many..." - Unknown
The "problem" that seems to plague all email systems is that they wind up being used as a replacement for a non-existing network file system. Users share ten's to hundred's of copies of the same word file. (If you think hundred's is hyperbole, the administration at the community college broadcasts announcements and then the group admins re-broadcasts the same.) No one deletes email because they cannot save/retrieve files as they move from one computer to another. Before picking an email system, pick a network file system with portable home directories.
We have a hodgepodge system at my U. You can use a standard imap/pop email with any client you choose (my favorite since I use pine) or you can use Exchange. While the exchange calendaring does seem to work well the email portion does not. Even with IMAP setup on the exchange server the client side compatibility in a mixed OS environment isn't as seamless as a straight IMAP option. Also it doesn't seem to scale as well as other services.
Gmail has both pop & imap access and their web interface is fast even on a slow connection. The spam filtering is very good. I've got a Yahoo account and while I still check it once a month that usually is just to empty the inbox into the spam folder. MS & Google also have calendaring options, but I don't believe Yahoo does. If calendaring is important get a demo on how well it works for shared calendaring and if there are privacy options.
One important factor about handing your email over to a third party vendor. Get the privacy agreement clearly spelled out. Since you are a U (and especially if you are large U) you will probably have data that falls under HIPAA or is export controlled that gets sent through email. Make sure that your groups will have a reasonable right to privacy and won't have to start running their own mail servers because grants or projects they work on have security requirements that your vendor won't meet.
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They *hate* that.
Take a look at PostPath. Email is only one piece of the system as you are looking at your communication needs. Don't overlook the integration with other collaboration products. Needless to say, I think a system should have lots of openness but also many of the features that our new students are demanding. Think VoIP, Mobility, Video Mail, Blogging tools, Video conferencing, and online collaboration tools I guess similar to WebEX or others. Put this all in a comprehensive manageable system, that gives them things they want to use. Good luck.
Nough said.
Go for the OS version if you dont care about support or can provide it inhouse (which is cool, some Unis can do this).
Now... please dont tell me youre either from UWash or Carnegie, cause then your "switch" is just not acceptable.
NO SIG
I want to know what happened to the plans they sent you.
I agree. The professors and staff need email addresses but NOT the students. Unless they get to keep these email addresses for life in which case it MIGHT make sense.
(IANAL)
My concerns would mostly be about having in-house servers vs using an outside provider
A few points:
- Would there be security/privacy/liability issues with having sensitive information on these servers, such as grades, student financial info, etc.?
- Who in your organization can access messages?
- If we drop your service (going in-house), will we be able to export all existing 'data' from your services?
- How long must we contract for?
- How many students/faculty/etc. are we allowed, and how much for overage?
- How much 'space' are we allowed?
- How long is your message retention for both closed and current e-mail accounts?
- Can our IT administrators access the system for archiving, backups, legal queries?
Good luck!
V for Vendetta: People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.
99% Chance you should go with MS due to the integration requirement and familiarity people have with MS stuff. If you're dead set against being locked down to MS stuff though (often policy driven), it might not be doable unless you can get it in writing, on video, and with a pinky promise.
Google probably has some fun cloudy online app ideas, but they probably violate all sorts of policies about access to data, storage of confidential data, etc.
Yahoo? Is this like when you invite the ugly girl/boy to go with you to the prom?
The best solution would be to build something in house. I take it you've let the situation progress to the point where no amount of patch work and frantic hand waving can keep it alive, and you need something to replace it with fast.
But we all know the answer will be the lowest bidder (who isn't Yahoo).
I think you mistakenly added a "Don't" in there ;)
The university in question will NOT be dumping a load of cash on this, and in fact will probably be saving some. Microsoft. Yahoo and Google all provide this free of charge to Universities - in exchange for getting their stuff and services used by a new bunch of students each and every year, some of whom will continue to use the service even after they graduate. In some ways the students are a commodity, who are being traded to the external provider in exchange for an externally-hosted service.
Senior management may not care about lock-in - they'll be looking at what they can offer students for the least amount of money. If it all works on paper over the next three to five years they may not care about anything else.
Sure, you need to pay someone to provision the accounts, but you don't have a box that sucks down power to run and cool and that needs to be patched and backed up. You have someone else to yell at if things break, too.
My workplace outsourced student mail to one of the larger players, over my initial objections, but I have to admit that overall it seems to be working out quite well.
You need a professional IT staff with real experience with LDAP and Novell Groupwise. If you are a big university, don't fuck around with Exchange. Universities have serious IT Needs and require elite administrators.
I looked over a contract between Google and a large university and found it to be very dangerous to the intellectual property rights of the university and to the privacy rights of students, faculty, and staff.
For example, because email is being disclosed to a third party, such as Google, it could affect the dates of disclosure (publication) of information and could, thus, cause a patent application to fail because of an excessive time lapse between publication and the application. It is necessary to bring the provider into the tent of protection so that patent rights are not harmed.
And in these days of litigation, consider who will get subpoenas, the university or the provider, and who will get notice in time to go to court to contest the delivery of the materials.
The terms in some of these contracts make the provider the copyright owner, or at least give a perpetual non-revocable license to the provider, even beyond the lifetime of the agreement. That can lead to some rather unhappy faculty who find that their publications, and their notes and discussions, have been licensed away, forever.
Also consider whether the university can get the email back at the end of the contract. There is a good chance that it will not be able to do so.
And consider whether you think it is a good idea for students, who tend to experiment with life's options, to begin to build a lifelong dossier that contains their university life emails.
The number of issues of this type is huge and most university lawyers are either not equipped to comprehend them or don't care to do so.
Most people I know who have deeply considered these things tend to find it a really bad idea to outsource university email without very, very strong contractual protections that think through the issues of now and the issues that might arise in the future, particularly when the university wants to terminate the agreement or move to another provider.
"Can support" is terribly far from "is supporting."
If they don't give you a blank stare, you might have a viable vendor. It's like a tech vendor selling to a hospital needs to know what HIPAA is.
Gmail has awesome calendaring. It allows you to share calendars. Your events can be emailed to you to remind you of them. It fully integrates with the email system. Lastly you can invite other people to your events through the calendar. What more do you need?
Talk to other Universities, and their staff, faculty, students, and email system administrators, and see what they think. Try and find Universities with similar needs to your's, and see what they like and don't like, and how they think it could be done better. Bring up any questionable issues to the representatives, and see what they have to say.
I say, follow UNL's example.
http://media.www.dailynebraskan.com/media/storage/paper857/news/2008/08/25/News/Microsoft.EMail.System.Chosen.Despite.Panel.Decision-3402881.shtml
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
When dealing with corporate vendors, having clear requirements understood by the selection committee is both a time saver for the vendors, and also an inoculation against some sales techniques.
Here's an off the top of my head list of core details to have figured out before meeting the reps:
Well, hope that helps.
If your university is going to rely on one of those 3 companies for something as critical as email, one has to wonder whether your computer related faculty and staff are really up to the task of teaching about modern technology. Seriously, setting up a proper instance of something like Zimbra is not that big a deal.
It's the University of Washington.
The former IT management (now gone, after losing $40million) decided to set up an Exchange server for everybody because UW's president wanted one for his Blackberry. Later, they discovered that it was too expensive to offer Exchange to all the students, and they decided to tell the students to use Gmail or Live@Edu.
Faculty and staff who've been migrated to Exchange hate it. Many have asked to get back onto the IMAP servers.
There's nothing wrong with those servers. They got a major hardware and software upgrade last year. However, all the people who worked on those servers were laid off last May, and have found new jobs. The few people still there are quite demoralized and have been deserting the sinking ship.
So they're stuck with The Plan, even as the magnitude of its idiocy becomes clear.
Forget all that junk. Use the Blackboard http://www.blackboard.com/ system. I must warn you; it's a proprietary system.
You know, any IT professional who needs sharp objects to commit suicide is sadly underqualified. "Down, Not Across" might be the ASR Mantra, but where's the fun in that? Oozing over a few things. Hell, if you've got super-sized UPSen and diesel back-up generators and a whole lot of cables and a leatherman I'm sure you can find more exciting ways to de-install both yourself and Exchange.
Hell, if it came down to it, you could de-install yourself quite spectactularly with the aid of duct tape, a Sun E450 and a four storey drop - and those Suns are pretty blunt.
Does your service support encrypted protocols?
Does your service support a standards based access for sending and receiving email (IMAP, POP3, SMTP)?
Hint: only GMail supports these two crucial features.
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'm assuming he meant an EXISTING system.
am i the only one thinking.. this is a university surely there is the talent to provide their own hosted and competitive system?
Whatever the system is probably is not worth keeping around.
What browsers and operating systems are supported for webmail? Keep in mind that even if the university has a standard browser, people will be accessing their mail from elsewhere (home, conferences, etc.). Saying "Just use IE" is not acceptable.
Is there a way to access mail using encrypted POP or IMAP. POP or IMAP is essential because college users are incredibly mobile. Constant connectivity cannot be assumed. On a related note, how do users check mail from cell phones?
When users access mail from a browser, is there decent security? Are the certificates properly signed?
Is there a way to offer integrated authentication so that users can sign on using their university ID and password?
--
Ask them how they could possibly think that changing words (as opposed to script tags) in emails was a good idea:
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-944315.html
It's an old story, but it's the same company.
I completely agree !
system migration and the ability to get at data in a standard way i VERY important
regards
John Jones
Basically, you're saying you can't trust an outside email provider to respect your privacy. If that's true, who do you trust? Your organization's own IT department? That's foolish. If you've followed the news at all, you've seen a lot of news stories about in-house IT providers failing to support their user's privacy, either because of sloppy security practices or actual snooping by IT employees.
Unless you maintain your own email server, you have to trust somebody not to look into your mailbox. If you have a good IT organization with a lot of smart, well-trained people working for, then it's reasonable to trust them with your email. But really, they're no more trustworthy than a big company with a reputation to maintain and deep pockets that make them eminently sueable. In any case, they're certainly more trustworthy than a lot of IT orgs I could name.
One other detail: the basic email protocols are not at all secure. So even if the server that stores the email is secure, there's lots of opportunity to have your email privacy violated. If your email contains info that you really don't outsiders to see, you should be using end-to-end encryption. And if you are, it doesn't really matter who your email provider is.
Nah, they are spending government and almuni money on that, tuition is a small part of the total budget.
For example, because email is being disclosed to a third party, such as Google, it could affect the dates of disclosure (publication) of information and could, thus, cause a patent application to fail because of an excessive time lapse between publication and the application. It is necessary to bring the provider into the tent of protection so that patent rights are not harmed.
Are there no telephone precedents for this?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Will the client side work (well) on a variety of platforms?
What are the back-end requirements? Do they lock you into a particular vendor, architecture, OS?
Is there support for handheld devices? For a variety of operating systems? On cheap phones or only (expensive) smart phones?
Support is important, but the relative need for support is also important. What have user's experiences been for these products?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Ask how well the products can interoperate with various 3rd party clients, including open source and different operating systems.
At work I have nothing but trouble trying to reliably use our Exchange server with Linux for calendar support.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
The joys of anonymous cowards. Hey, Can support means "with the right person and talent" not "If the idiot programmers did it right." More often than not it's the end-user that has to make workarounds for getting a product to do what they want it to do.
And for the poor guy working for International Paper - boohoo. Go back East of the Mississippi where you belong. I left you idiots behind for a more reasonable and less corrupt state out West.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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/
(1) The mail provider has to sign a contract swearing to secrecy, nondisclosure, and not reading your e-mail. Aside from the obvious implications of losing private e-mail, you might waive privilege if you are sending e-mail over non-secure lines. Also, if you have trade secrets that get pilfered, you might have to prove how much due diligence you spent in protecting its secrecy. If your e-mail provider didn't have an affirmative contractual duty to keep all data secure, you may be in a world of hurt even if there is no security breach.
(2) Backup. The provider has to go through disaster recovery plans and backup tests.
(3) Post-termination rights. After you end the program, the provider has to provide all the e-mail to you in a specified format as well as the necessary expertise and time to help you transition to the next platform. You don't want to be a victim of lock-in.
(4) Post-termination Rights Redux. If the provider goes bankrupt, make it clear that this is not a lease under the federal bankruptcy laws. If the provider files for bankruptcy protection, defaults on its corporate bonds, is delisted from the exchange, or otherwise becomes insolvent, you have the right to immediately terminate the contract and pull the data out.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
When something so simple has to be outsourced. Seriously, one person could do this if given the right resources.
What it sounds like this university is doing, or trying to do, or may end up doing out of foolishness, is simply outsourcing. I can tell you from experience you will simply never be satisfied by outsourcing a crucial function like email. But it sounds like this is a "low technology" school that is unwilling to invest in, and deploy, their own network facilities to do email. Are they afraid they cannot acquire the technical skills to accomplish this? It sure sounds like a school I would not recommend anyone go to for any kind of science or engineering education. May it would be fine for some other fields not related to technology.
So why not just let the students each, individually, pick their own service provider? They don't have to have email addresses with the school's domain name on it. And by picking their own outside the school's domain, they get an address they can keep once they graduate (or transfer out of desperation).
In addition to the above, the school should still run an internal-only email system. This email system would have no access to the internet. It would not accept SMTP connections from outside. It would not attempt to make email connections to the outside. All email would be within that system alone. Then the only spam people would get would be from someone they can suspend, kick out, demote, or fire (or in the case of tenured faculty, lock them out of the internal system). Let everyone use their outside email for outside communications (reaching it through the campus LAN/WAN is OK), and their inside email for inside communications.
Teachers will want to be able to do bulk communications with students in their classes, for example. That can get troublesome on an outside provider, because this can appear to be spam because of the duplications and/or large lists. Doing such academic specific email only on the internal system ensures control, and academic specific policies can be enforced (such as how to determine what is spam). Also, research faculty may need greater levels of security than outside vendors should ever be trusted with. If an outside vendor is used, many departments will still end up setting up something of their own, anyway.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
When I was in college 5 years ago, the school got real big on this whole email thing. They rolled out a new system where it was integrated into the students' web site, featured webmail, blah blah blah. I wasn't really interested in any of that bullshit. I had it forward all my incoming mail to an account (POP) I actually used on a totally different domain, and never really touched what they set up.
It's also worth noting that they would send out more emails to the entire student body than was really needed. The school was maybe 90% male, and the entire student body would get sent emails about, for example, women's events. Ask the vendor how easy it is to send out targeted emails, because if you start spamming your own students, they'll stop paying attention.
I would recommend trying out Surgemail.
This is a Multi-platform (Windows, OSX, Linux, Solaris, etc...) mail system with Built-in Calendaring features, Blogging, Photo and File Storage system, Mail list, Messenging Chat System and much more.
check out http://www.netwinsite.com for more information.
If you are stuck with the problems with only those 3, I will give you this feedback:
- Hotmail sometimes loses incoming mail without informing the sender anything
- Yahoo mail has lots of delivery delay problems
- Google to date has been fast, functional, and supports IMAP and POP3 without paying anything extra.
For my choice of the 3, Google would be the best. But before committing to it, consider Surgemail since most will be accessing from within your network. The other 3 will produce significant amounts of extra bandwidth usage for nothing when you can host it in house.
I would like to keep my po.. I mean my research flowing smoothly without having the external web based email systems slowing down the Internet in general.
*Headline News* censorship shuts down the Internet! More at 6PM!
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.
First Fail!
This has/is happen at a University in Wellington/NZ, I believe they are moving from Rockliffe to Microsoft. One of the reason for hosting it in-house was to ensure/guarantee delivery of email to student, agreed there are also privacy and and intellectual property concerns, but the under pinning facet was that mail could be traced right thru the University systems especially when being delivered from Student Administration and there were no issues with access to logs or anything. I personally wouldn't use the external services as you tend to loss control, sure you have the headache of hardware/software maintenance, but there is potential for a whole lot of greif with external providers. If you do choose an external provider be very careful and make sure your organisation is cover for a legal standpoint
My university uses Gmail for students, and Exchange for staff. We all get an @asu.edu email address. I haven't ever used exchange, so I'm not qualified to comment on that, but Gmail is great for me. I can use any mail client I want (Thunderbird, Sylpheed, Outlook, etc.) with either POP or IMAP as well as the web interface, and as of right now the quota is around 8GB. Calendar and Documents support is included, so collaboration is a breeze and is nice when I need to do some peer editing with my classmates (my English prof uses this feature quite a bit). We also get Google sites, so our LUG created a page to point people in the right direction with help on Linux, my friend created a page for his COD clan, my CS professor created one to put new assignments on, and so on.
Overall It's been painless, I would highly recomend it. The big selling point for me is being able to check my mail from any machine which has an POP/IMAP client/browser (including my Linux box and my iPod). Of course, YMMV, the standard disclaimers apply for outsourcing any of your systems to a single vendor
I heard it's pretty good!
The university I attend
Sorry but that opening statement tells me that you are either some tech support person that is looking to get his/her foot in the door or look smart with other fellow techies by "suggesting" whatever the results of this question.
I realize that there are probably students that help with university networks and all but to think they actually have some say in what direction this university will go in is a little far fetched.
Here is a good example of a person taking an open forum and using it for their own glory.
That sucks. We've got 80,000 mailboxes here running cyrus, no quota. I think management still asks us to tell people we've got 2GB quotas despite the fact we haven't had quotas in 3 or 4 years. The usage pattern has been constant over the last few years, (except for the CS prof who had a 16GB mailbox because he liked to store files in mail). The reason we've been able to not use quotas is because disk is constantly getting cheaper.
We had to put quite a bit of work into cyrus to make it scale to this size reliably, but currently we run it with only 2 FTEs. One of the best features of the system we have is we replicate the data to 2 additional sites, so even if we lose an individual server ( there are 20 in each site) we'll be back online in less than 15 minutes.
I kinda wish all the tricks we have learned would get shared, but I dunno how much has made it back out into the community.
The other place where we save cash is essentially using commodity hardware instead of a SAN.
That said, if we hit a serious bug like that, I bet there would be a push to outsource. We've hit them before with cyrus, but not since any of the alternatives were available.
"The university I attend..."
The poster is a student at his 'university', not involved in the decision-making process. The OP is probably some post-pubescent, pre-adult, who hangs around the beardos in the IT department and got the bright idea to 'Ask Slashdot' for opinions after he overheard them bitching that the uni was going to, "Take our jobs!", by outsourcing student e-mail. Ph-uh-ck!
Sig this!
In all seriousness - which is more efficient, having one piece of paper stuck up on my wall per term or having to turn on my computer every time I want to check my timetable?
Most students will probably end up printing it anyway.
"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."
(...)
We just launched Google-hosted email for all students, which is projected to save $250,000 annually (or more if TCO is considered)."
I think you are having two account books here. I will accept your numbers (why I shouldn't?) but I can't accept your conclussion: even if your higher quota costs US$500.000, that's a one shoot cost for (probably) between three and five fiscal years; that's peanuts.
"It was fun being the guinea-pig for scaling up Cyrus, but by partnering with Google..."
Even accepting that you will save 250.000US$/year (which I have problems to accept without see the detailed numbers) that's not a for-profit company, that's a f* University. If it's all just a short time cost trade off, just close the whole damned thing down! Going to University (and maintaining them) is more expensive that not going or having them, at least on the short term, isn't it? While not the main point, one of the very points of having universities (and/or technical colleges) is in order to "try to scale Cyrus"; it's not per chance that Cyrus itself comes from a University.
Or what is this? Another version of the 700.000M US$ story? socialice the costs (a university founding Cyrus early development) and privatice the benefits (now the big bucks going to a private company which will take the delta knowledge of your big environment to themselves and themselves only)?
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.
For example, because email is being disclosed to a third party, such as Google, it could affect the dates of disclosure (publication) of information and could, thus
Third party can be redefined through contract. Our University doesn't "share personal information with third parties" but defines third parties as those it doesn't have a business affiliation with.
So it won't give your SSN to a non-affiliated health agency, but it'll sign a contract with a W2-processing company and give them your W2 statements to disseminate to you electronically with opt-out (unless, of course, you nearly cause a riot after learning about this, and they have the company delete all records and start with an opt-in package instead of opt-out).
I always thought Pine worked well enough.
There are LOTS of issues here. If you are just keeping a campus directory of off-campus addresses fine. However if you try to "school brand" it.... 1) On-campus authentication support 2) On-campus helpdesk support 3) On-campus portal 4) ITARS issues 5) Backups? 6) Tracking of email problems inside the blackbox? etc.. About all you "gain" is the backend-mailstore is somewhere else. The backend mailstore is by far the smallest cost and complexity of any email system when you really examine it. And for this, you trade your students to a private company they will probably remain with once they get used to it. The ethical implications of this are enormous, you are literally selling your students eyeballs to an ADVERTISING COMPANY for a little bit of savings on mail storage. Anyone who can't see the ethical blind-spot that most PUBLIC SERVICE administrators have here..... they SHOULD. Let me make a simple analogy. If a bank came to your school and said we will do $50K worth of free accounting or other services for you, and in EXCHANGE all you have to do is require all students have a checking acount with us..... What would you say? This is a total sellout and most people don't get it.
"Where will our data be located?", and "what assurances are there of its integrity and security?".
Of course I'm still very suspicious of this recent trend of outsourcing such business-critical services to external parties. I don't see what's wrong with a box running Postfix and a webdav ics calendar.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Typical provider contracts for these things repudiate all of the points you would like to have. They tend to explicitly claim that they have full access rights to do data mining. They may or may not be willing to refrain from third party disclosures. But even if they do, plan on 'em laying down and playing dead if anybody shows up with a DMCA request.
As for post termination rights - One contract I looked at said that there would be no, zero, nada, none - that the email would not be returned, period. And it would be retained.
University IT departments are really selling the souls of the students, faculty, and staff for relatively little in return.
The University of California, to take but one example, could plausibly lose much of its stream of revenue, measured in cubic millions of dollars, from patent licensing because of patent failures resulting from sloppy agreements made to save a few hundred $k.
And to make it worse, some of these agreements, particularly Google's, incorporate massive amounts of language, rights, and restrictions via URLs to highly fluid external sources. In other words, it is rather hard to nail down the exact language of the contract today, and even harder to do it at any time in the future.
Very simple: Just ask each of them if they will provide FREE (all meanings of FREE) client software that runs on EVERY students computer even if that computer is running Linux or Solaris or Mac OS is if the "computer" is a Phone.
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.
The offerings of Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are probably more sophisticated than what you are currently offering. I am not familiar with Yahoo's offerings. I did look at Live@Edu and Google Apps. It depends on your needs and your staff. Microsoft's Live@Edu offered more of a facebook-esque structure, where Google's offered a series of highly integrated apps designed more for classroom use (online courseware). If you want single sign on that integrates in a no-software-development-required manner, then Microsoft has a better offering. But you will need to buy Microsoft Identity Integration Server (pieces of it's previous incarnation are free with Win2K3 but require more effort to setup). So with Microsoft's solution, you will be buying servers and software and having your staff set it up. Google Apps will require some coding/scripting to facilitate single sign on. Fortunately, Google has done most of the work and has a ton of code and utilities that you can download and implement. For us, Google's approach fit better since we had developers/scripters/integrators already in house. Also, Google's business is the web, so I perceived there services having more staying power. Microsoft really hasn't decided yet what it's future will be concerning the web.
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 :)
Three vendors? You must be new here; everyone else on this board only sees two! :D
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
One that meets your needs?
Seriously, you're canning the old one because you say it no longer fits your needs. Since software doesn't mutate, then your needs must have changed, so pick something that meets your needs. The questions you should ask are "Can it do what the old one does?" and "Can it do X, Y, Z", where X, Y, Z are the needs you've added that are making you jump boat in the first place.
Yes, it really is that dirt simple.
-- Terry
They moved all institutions to Google after considering more than those 3 vendors.
Simple questions:
How much does it cost to 1) switch to your system 2) remain in your system 3) get out of your system
How easy is it to do the initial switch, general administration and the switch back out
How easy is it for our students to use
What integration have you available with our current portal(s)
Do you have (open source) plugins in our favorite language that we can use to generate accounts from our favorite application. It's important that if you switch your local administration, the plugin can switch too.
Can we do webmail, (secure) imap, (secure) pop and authenticated smtp relay, eventually secure calendaring
What integration with your other apps do you have. What is the roadmap for your current apps.
How does your system scale on a single domain
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
That "$500K to upgrade Cyrus quotas to 1G" is total HORSE-POOP! There's only one reason anyone would quote that figure. They are in bed with the Google guys, and had to come up with an outrageous justification to push the switch. Kickbacks? You got sold out to an ADVERTISING COMPANY and this is a victory?
Over the summer my university announced that they had decided that both Google and MS had their strength so they decided to let each student decide for themselves. So we can transfer our .edu email over to either google or MS.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Google is pretty compelling. Yahoo! is essentially a spam magnet. I'd setup an account there just to collect spam. Microsoft? They're probably going to either sue you for choosing one of the other two or find someone at the University sympathetic to their cause (read: in need of an endowment!)!
This seems very unnecessary today. I understand the legacy and when universities where a big percent of the Internet then e-mail naturally went with your provider. But these days most people have multiple accounts all over the place and I don't see why a student needs an 'official' e-mail address anyway.
1. How well does your email system work with non-Windows operating systems?
2. When a user is not running Windows, does he have access to full features?
3. Does every user, independent of operating system, have the ability to search his mail?
4. Does every user, independent of operating system, have the ability to download his mail in a seamless fashion without having to call IT for instructions?
5. What are the names and contact information of 5 of your best installations?
6. What are the names and contact information of 5 of your worst installations?
7. Why should we hire you?
8. Why should we hire your competitor?
9. When your system has failed in the past, what is your mean time to restoration of operation?
10. What is your worst time to restoration of operation?
11. What is your mean delivery time?
12. What is your mean delivery rate? If it is not above 99.99999% (seven 9s) provide details of the failures, and the protocols you have in place to track and correct them.
13. What is your archival plan?
14. What is your plan for retiring accounts?
15. What is your disaster recovery plan?
16. What is your tech support plan for our IT department?
17. What is your tech support plan for our users?
18. What is your training support plan for our admins?
19. How healthy is your company? Can we expect you to be in business for 5 years? 10? 20?
20. What happens to our data if you fail before our contract is up?
21. What happens to our data after our contract is up and you're still in business?
22. How recently has your system been broken in to? How long did it take you to detect it? And to respond? Is that typical of break-ins to your system?
23. What privacy and security controls to you have in place?
24. What would you do, or have you done, when faced with a subpoena for data on your users, who will be our students, faculty, and administrators?
25. What authority will you give or not give to our faculty and administrators over student data?
And that's just off the top of my head. Be sure to get the answers in writing.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
The university in question is NAU... Regardless of which system is picked, this is going to be a good move; you should see the system they use now.
Sun makes a mailserver that runs some of the largest ISP's. Something like 30% of all mailboxes on the planet, with individual deployments larger than 5 million mailboxes a common sight.
A 50,000 seat University should be able to fit on a single T5120 and FC/AL disk array hidden in a basement somewhere. The trick with email is to not skimp on the disk. Email is an I/O problem. Disk speed is everything. The 5120 has a direct I/O channel that is perfect for an FC/AL card and storage array.
Privacy and data retention policies (We know Google loves to data mine your gmail accounts)
Supported Protocols (POP, IMAP, Web-based, MS Exchange Compatible, etc)
Service Level Agreement
Data backup policies
Ease of administration
Integrated Spam/Phishing and Anti-virus filters (Both inbound and outbound)
Integration with existing AD/LDAP Services for authentication
Sounds more like you were a guinea-pig for ZFS, which maybe wasn't the super best choice for a filesystem to host Cyrus. I'm sure everyone else who now can use Cyrus with ZFS thanks you, but it definitely wasn't the most cluefull move. But hey, ZFS is neat-o, I can understand the attraction.
Exchange is the biggest piece of crap! I have wasted hours of my life administering Exchange and it sucks!
Simple things like moving mail and configs from one 2007 exchange server to another (on a different Active Directory) should be easy but it's not.
I'll take Sendmail anyday over exchange (and I HATE sendmail).
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
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.
Add a backup or DR server, and there goes your $264k.
and email forwarding, for those of us who would rather use our own setup.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I would strongly recommend avoiding anything email related from Microsoft (services or software) or Yahoo (services, afaik they dont selll software).
Assuming the three options you mentioned are the only ones being considered, that of course leaves only one.
Are you considering only hosted/serviced options, or is 'in-house' yet an option? If so, there are a wide variety of F/OSS solutions that could work.
If the decision has already been made to definitely outsource this, then I would suggest you consider adding outblaze.com to the list of possibles.
I'd recommend doing it in phases:
Phase 1: Volunteers.
Phase 2: Freshmen and new employees/faculty, with an opt-out and for employees and faculty, dual-accounts
Phase 3: Undergrads and employees/faculty, with an opt-out and, with professor approval, dual accounts
Phase 4: Graduate students with both opt-out and dual-accounts
Keep the legacy system running but with a greatly-reduced user-base for those who, for legal or other reasons, must use a system controlled by the University. Some students and faculty may choose to have both kinds of accounts, others may choose to keep just the legacy system.
After Phase 2 and especially after Phase 3, your legacy system's workload will be greatly reduced. After 4 years, practically the only people who are using your legacy system will be some employees, some long-term grad students, and those who have a specific need to have their mail stay in-house.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Stay away from Exchange. It will scale and it will handle the demand, but it is probably overkill and more headache than you want to deal with. In your position I'd go with Google and let them deal with the capacity planning issues. Their integration with current systems won't be as good as Microsoft, but how much integration are you really talking about? Maybe allowing students to update a calendar with their class schedule? You can probably do that with RSS feeds and iCal out of Google.
If you really have to choose from one of these vendors as opposed to building your own system, you've got to think how people will be using the services. Ever try to get Hotmail to work with Evolution on Linux. That's a pain and I'm sure there are more than a couple people who would like to use Thunderbird or some other program instead of opening a web browser all of the time. Go with Google.
Is this the same University of Washington of Pine fame? If so, it's a sad day for them.
It sure is! And its tech support only costs 0.02 cents a minute!
Yes, and after 7 hours of tech support you only owe $37,548. Its obviously a matter of opinion.
This sounds like UC Davis. I do some work connected with them. Management that couldn't find it's ass with both hands without help. Worked on a project there once and the IT mucky-mucks I met there were among the most clueless short attention-span morons I've ever met. I'm sure they had some PowerPoint presentation with a bunch of graphs & numbers, and the goober up above totally bought it. Yeah you just keep believing those figures buddy, just like we HAD to invade Iraq because of all those WMD.
At the university I work at, this question has also been brought up. In a time when university budgets are getting tighter, IT directors always want to cut costs, and outsourcing email seems to be a hot topic. However, there are some serious considerations:
;-) )
1. FERPA: Outsourcing email opens up the university to all kinds of possible litigation in regards to the federal FERPA regs. How is this addressed?
2. LEA Compliance: Along a similar line, there are time when an institution is required to produce email to law enforcement. How is this handled, what is the process, how long does it take, and what safeguards are in place to protect the students privacy? These are valid questions that, from a monetary standpoint, can cost the institution much more than they would save by outsourcing if not handled correctly. And that would be from a single instance - any sizable institution will have this situation occur multiple times per school year.
3. Security: As we have seen with the recent scandle with Gov. Palin, it is not very hard to crack an email account - Within an institution, attempts to access the account can be monitored, even limited to specific addresses if need be. If the university is doing any kind of research, outsourcing could open up the institution to IP theft not only from other institutions, but from foreign agencies... Just one breach could end up costing the institution millions in research grants. So, the question to ask would be how would this be addressed?
4. User support: At the institution where I work, our help desk staff provides support 24X7 - when there is a problem, how accessible is the companies' help, and how is that support billed??? Is there a phone number that can be called for support?
5. Along with the user support, how does the company handle user education? Yes, it is easy and intuitive for users to use gmail, yahoo, etc... but do these companies do any kind of proactive user education (such as preventing them from replying to known phishing sites...)??? At the institution I am at, we proactively try to handle spammers, phishing, etc... to protect our users (and the university).
These are just things off the top of my head... I am sure I can come up with much, much more of an argument to keep university email inhouse (this doesn't even address future possibilities such as integrated messaging - i.e. tying voicemail to email, etc....)
I must admit that I am biased, however... I am the email administrator at a major university (and I *LIKE* my job
An ounce of perception is worth a pound of obscure
Why not let the students use their own email addresses?
I now have one more extra email address to keep track of and worry if it's getting forwarded properly to my main Gmail account or not. The school could not or would not just use an email address I gave them when I signed up.
I bet most college age people have at least one email address by now. If not, have the ones that don't sign up with one of the free biggies in the orientation class.
There are 4 public universities in Grenoble, fr, which couldn't agree on a solution, so the equivalent of the state (the region), decided for them to give 3MÂâ to Microsoft (as "it's used by everyone") for and exchange/sharepoint solution.
well... it's the worst piece of shit *ever*. took 3 years to barely stabilize, requires a roomfull of servers (a dozen or so racksfull), is subject to monster spamming, takes forever to deliver mail 'cause it has to go through an unspecified number of anti-virus,...
and I won't go into all the mailing list management crap.
the company i work for moved to microsoft sharepoint about 6 months ago. seeing as i work at a small branch, i don't have to use it much (we have an ubuntu server with ftp for documents and scheduling is done by waving across the room at whoever you want to speak to). however, mail is still handled by sharepoint. last week, sharepoint just stopped working for a day. i don't know what they did in head office on that day, nor do i want to. nor do i want to know how many weekends have been spent on trying to get it to work better (it had huge teething troubles)
the point of this is, if you want mail and calendering, use proper software which works.
By my standards you ask WRONG question. The way you "crafted" the question severely limits "solution space". Do you want simply choose new local email monopoly? Anything worth truly to be called a University should choose "main email system" in "heterogeneous mix for ever". It makes supports for public standards crucial. If you want to be "locked in" then you do deserve the consequences.
"What peer institutions are using your system?" and "Give us the names of the people at those schools responsible for making it work".
As more Universities go this route the questions we think to ask (and more) will be addressed. Sometimes well, sometimes poorly but they will be addressed (e.g. HIPAA, Sunshine Laws, ITAR, DOD research, etc.). Holding out a little while longer means they may get addressed better. Going earlier likely means you have more influence (if Google solves U of Oregons's issues, they have solved most of U of Alaska's too) on how they are addressed. Place your bets and take your chances.
As our local managers have pointed out: Google has N hundred security engineers, can you compete with that? Well we had a shot until half the security staff were let go but now, No we can't.
Read my post. I already accounted for a backup.
Unfortunatly the original poster provides no information about their "legacy mail system" or why it dosn't fit their needs. As well as any indication as to what needs it dosn't fit. There is also no information about the entity itself or where it is. Since all of their potential outsourcees are US based companies it does actually matter what country they are in. If they are in the US it isn't an issue (legally speaking), if they are in the EU then what they are planning is almost certainly illegal, elsewhere they'd need to check with their national government first.
Outsourcing is always going to be a risky activity. That risk is greater when outsourcing to an entity larger than you (try and sue them and they'll laugh at you) and when they are in a different country.
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.
You were nowhere near to being the largest Cyrus installation. I would guess that my company, FastMail, is the largest. And I'll give you a hint - your university missed the whole point of how to run a successful Cyrus installation. Maybe next time they should hire some sysadmins who know what they're doing...
There is an assumption of privacy at universities; however, the university I worked for was subject to the public's open records requests. When requested, our IT department had to hand over the email of any employee (maybe student?). I believe this is a federal law (in the US).
Expanding on that concern, I wonder if online services allow IT departments to perform what is necessary for open records requests, or would that be a violation of TOS?
I am not sure what the demographic is of your uni, I do however know from my personal experience that many uni's have a very broad base of computer users. It is often the case that there will be some users on macs, windows, linux, bsd, solaris and every other flavor of operating system. With that in mind its important to note that the end decision should take this into account, that mean that exchange is out if they plan to use rpc over https which is outlook anywhere. Both Yahoo and Google have API's which are broadly supported or easy to implement in other applications. It is really down to how you guys feel the UI works for you, take into account that everyone has their own opinion about what they want from a UI. Again open standards help everyone in the longer term.
What ever happened to the idea of universities running their own systems? My previous university decided to centralise/outsource most of the IT services. As most of us expected the service became inflexible and unreliable, and most importantly it was really difficult to reach the people who could fix it. It sucked. Linux support? Sun support? AIX support? Nope. Everything was designed around PC's - other systems were seen as exotic and unnecessary. Oh, and there was the week when the email system lost about half of all messages, that was fun. Yes, it costs money to run an email system. But you pay for getting the service you want. Now here's the clever part - if you share what you learn, the dev/maintenance costs become more manageable. Isn't that the idea behind open source?
That sounds like a system that can easily be gamed.
1) Initiate trivial business affiliation
2) Share data
3) Profit!
One might even be able to twist things such that the sharing of the information is the business affiliation itself.
Years ago, universities would offer a for-life email account to their graduating students... Which was very useful, somewhere you could always be reached regardless of which isp you were using or where you worked. And for simple text-only emails it worked out nicely for the students and didn't cost the university a whole lot to provide.
But if you go with a mail system that has a per-user licensing cost then it's simply impossible to provide that kind of service, so a lot of places don't do it anymore.
Other things to consider...
Every time you get a new set of students you will be adding hundreds of accounts and potentially removing hundreds of old ones, so you need something easily scriptable.
How is the mail and account details stored, is it stored on your site or is it kept at a third party? What guarantees do you have that it will be possible to access your data at all times and be able to migrate to another service in the future.... A lot of places don't consider that they might want to change suppliers in the future, and let themselves get locked in.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
How about backup and recovery; /..)
How long will it take to backup, and to recover a Email or a database?
Public agenda's can they be made; to show for example students classes.
Can the teacher and students databases be sperated (for faster recovery).
Do they provide a weblient or a software client (like eudora/ outlook
Will it be compatible with mobile devices like PDA's?
Will it be compatible with modern phones standards(students often have such phones).
Are there options for group mailing or perhaps limits > so for example a teacher can mail all his students or his class.
But not the oposite; an angry student shouldnt be allowed to Email to all..
Limitations of mailboxe sizes and send and recieve seizes.
Combined with filtering of content ( you dont want students to store an iso file in their mailbox..)
The easy creation proces of mailboxes (each new year how many mailboxes have to be made ??)
Can for example a classrooms teacher be alowed to make his students mailboxes, or does some IT person has to create 2000 mailbxes; can that proces be automated / scripted ??
removing of past students > how to handle their email (move those students to another DB(=database) and Backup that DB?.
And what are the costs of the hardware
What are the cost of the software
If you go for a certain type of hardware configuration (i assume its big) can they advise you on it, or maybe with the hardware itself. (in most cases you will require a fast powerfull disk system, maybe a quick SAN )
I dont know for the other products
But on most of these items i just wrote down for you.
Exchange 2007 is a great mail system.
(especialy its backup methods, and fail over methods, scriptability)
Oh and you might even wonder how about software as a service > meaning let an other party manage it; while your school just only uses it. (no IT overhead).
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
Please explain in detail, what in the world inspired you to:
1. Run Cyrus on ZFS (all it needs from afilesystem is high inode numbers and directory size).
2. Insist on using expensive servers and SAN storage for scaling Cyrus, an application that nearly perfectly scales in clusters, and can be used with extremely unreliable media due to easy incremental backups and replication.
You need 50T of storage. Multiply by four to take into account replication and two sets of backups (but no RAID). Assuming you want extra-fast SCSI drives (that you don't have to do) for primary live servers and cheaper/larger SATA for secondary and backups, you have about $100K in storage costs. Assuming that your budget is $250K (your $500K estimate minus $250K "savings"), you have $150K for the rest of everything. Again, assuming $2K per server not counting storage (that's a freaking fast server), you get 75 servers that you are supposed to stuff with 300 drives, what just happens to fit.
Obviously "TCO" is higher because this has to be installed, backup and user configuration scripts should be written, load balancing configured in Cyrus, and someone has to occasionally migrate mailboxes between servers, restore backups, and install replacement servers and drives when something fails, however this is not fundamentally different from what you are supposed to do already.
What do you think, makes Google servers so cheap, some kind of inherent scalability or the fact that they can sacrifice a tiny amount of availability and get massive savings on storage while everybody else runs their email on something more appropriate for airline reservation or stock exchange trading system?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I agree that outsourcing can be good. However, if you are who I think you are, I would say that it is absolutely ridiculous that $500,000 is considered too much to spend on a mail system upgrade. The university just spent $140 million on a new Gym, $100 million for a new union, $108 million for the main library renovations. The mail system isn't a visible presence on campus but it IS CRITICAL university infrastructure and at least 1/100th as important as those other projects.
They can and should shell out a million on a quality mail system if that is all it takes to get one. Because the central system sucks, every quality admin on campus has to run their own system. How does $500,000 for 50,000 mailboxes compare to $5,000 for 100 which is less than what we're paying in my area for the server hardware, exchange, anti-virus and anti-spam? How do the time costs of maintaining one system compare to maintaining 100? How ridiculous is it that Bob in hr has no way of accessing the calendar of Sue in Maps?
We payed at least $5,000 for our server and licenses, but barring trust issues, I'm damn sure our group would pay a hell of a lot more than that for a good central mail system.
East Carolina University recognized that part of e-mail management is to set a policy for the retention of e-mail by important employees. -- Ben
Benjamin Wright, Dallas, Texas, benjaminwright.us
So this is a university. This university is searching for some means to provide email access to their students. Preferrably one that integrates into their existing access management which probably is along the lines of LDAP.
What exactly do they need Google, Microsoft or Yahoo for? Can't they set-up own SMTP, POP3, and IMAP servers? Aren't they able to adopt some standard web-frontend like "Horde" for their taste?
Could someone please explain to me what "integration" means in terms of email? I picture a package that reads my email for me, figures out what meetings, talks, and parties I'm invited to, figures out which ones I want to attend based on my current schedule and priorities, adds them to my calendar, downloads and prints the papers I need for the meetings, and orders me the ingredients for whatever recipe would work well for the potlucks.
Any interpretation of "integration" I can think of sounds like a violation of any reasonable security policy.
Unless you mean "integration" in the way QT / GTK people mean, which means "the buttons have the same texture maps that they do on my word processor"...
Seriously, could someone give me an example?
And for the record, my university, that of Colorado at Boulder, provides some ad-hoc turd for webmail, and at least 95% of the students I know use gmail/yahoo/hotmail instead.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
I hope they were at least smart enough to negotiate Premier phone support. That alone would let you eliminate multiple HelpDesk positions and would save a ton of money.
I've never used Cyrus personally, but in the e-mail world that's a fairly small mail cluster. We have a legacy system built with open source components running 50,000 active users hosted on three boxes, and we could drop that to two if we were willing to sacrifice redundancy. Granted the majority of accounts are relatively small quota and the user base is shrinking, but when it was our primary mail system we had hundreds of thousands.
On our current system we push about 50,000 users (with unlimited quota) per backend server, with the main limiter being storage space. The SMTP servers on the front-end (which also handle spam filtering) handle enough traffic for a few hundred thousand users each (pooled, not dedicated to any particular machine).
That isn't to say outsourcing is a bad idea. It's less about the software (many of us rely heavily on the same open source packages freely available) than the expertise to use it effectively.
You can use use google mail with Mac, PC, Linux, Solaris, whatever. You can use gmail with Outlook, Thunderbird, Blackberry, or web based.
Google does not care what OS you use, or which appliactions.
Microsoft only works with Microsoft.
I'm going to toss an oar in the water because I'm deploying Zimbra for my company to replace (please, put your beverage down) Exchange 5.5 on Win2k with an NT4 PDC.
Ok, now that you're done laughing...
Zimbra is, to use the words Jerry Pournelle once used to describe Vulcan (dBase I), "infuriatingly excellent".
Within the current limts of AJAX, it's web client program is very nice indeed; they have a detachable client but I haven't played with it yet.
The system runs atop a lotta buncha FOSS packages, though it brings them all along with it, which means you really want to dedicate a box/VM to running it -- this is a feature, though, not a bug. Why? Because it means that *they* worry about upstream security bugs, not you.
It does POP/SSL and IMAP/SSL, and the webclient itself can be locked to only run SSL, if you like. It has a very nice multi-domain admin control panel, the commercial version will do hot backups and connect to Outlook, and there's a Migration Wizard to pull mail, contacts and calendars out of Exchange Server.
That said, we now proceed to the infuriating part.
There are lots of things that I (having been a mail admin for 10 or 15 years, and moving about 500 real messages a day over 15 mailing lists) think it ought to do that it doesn't.
The two most fundamental are that it doesn't thread on In-Reply-To but on message title, and that it doesn't handle mailing list traffic too well. The former is Broken As Designed: there has been a bug on their (open) Bugzilla about this since v3.mumble; they just shipped 5.0.10, but no progress on the bug, no official comment, and they decline to *close* the damned bug as well -- I think that this falls in the category of "keeping all your nuts in one basket".
On the latter front, there are "next unread" and "previous unread" keys, but since they paginate their message list (for reasons that I publically assume have to do with shitty AJAX toolkits and no one disagrees with me), it would be nice, you'd think, if those went *over* the edges of pages; they don't. Since that's true, you have to read your mailing list mail backwards -- since there's no practical way to get to the *beginning* of the new traffic in the folder if you sort forwards.
There are other foibles, but perhaps business (and *maybe* college) users wouldn't notice them; they're largely the result of growing up on Mutt.
Mutt definitely sucks less than Zimbra; I haven't filed 36 bugs on Mutt.
Go into it with your eyes open, certainly, but for all that I'm personally annoyed with it, Zimbra has some good things to recommend it.
John Holder, Mike Morse, and a couple of the other staffers who frequent their forum are pretty good guys.
And in the last month, denizens thereof have rolled out 22K and 47.5K mailbox installs. So clearly it scales. Will you have to learn some things? Yes. Well it be perfect, and roll out to a college sized install with no problems whatever? Well, maybe, but I'd plan for a *few* annoyances.
Should you ignore it?
Only at your peril.
Outside hosting is, as has already been noted, extremely fraught with legal landmines.
And this month has, I think, displayed quite nicely the risks of failing to heed warnings.
A couple of days ago, there was a very passionate supporter at a McCain rally, who wanted Senator McCain to go after Obama harder on character issues.
"Senator, I'm begging you..." he pleaded, backed up by the cheers of a very partisan crowd..
Allow me to take a cue from that fellow...
I'm begging you to get your people to reconsider any of those three companies. I like Gmail and use it myself, but I would never allow those three companies to have any measure of control over the mail systems of a university.
Please consider for a moment that the student body at a large university is the primary demographic target for many companies and their mail (or their entire mail experience) will likely be inundated with tons of advertising. Other than Gmail, I can't imagine what kind of spam prevention the other two have in place, since Yahoo!'s mail servers are living, breathing pits of junk mail. Don't think for a moment that any of these companies wouldn't sell ad space and mail lists to the highest bidders.
I would strongly urge you to keep in in house, using one of the very fine FOSS solutions already mentioned in other posts.
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
Try to run ms-exchange on your linux server. Try to read an outlook 2007 .pst file with outlook 2003, or outlook express, or anything except outlook 2007. Same thing with sharepoint.
With msft, everything is always about vendor lock-in
Google Apps work just as well on any platform, and with any applications.
Gmail works with web, thunderbird, even outlook. Gmail syncs with the google calendar just fine.
I've gone to two public universities in South Dakota, Dakota State in Madison and the School of Mines & Technology now in Rapid City. We used a web-based MS Outlook client for our email system, and it was horrible. The interface just wasn't intuitive, it was slow, and just generally a pain in the ass. We use Google at the School of Mines and it's lightyears ahead. I mean, Gmail is most everyone's favorite webmail client for a reason.
(a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
Excuse me, but what is a "deltic"? I can't find anything on the 'net except for references to trains and engines -- and you are obviously not a train. :)
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
> What more do you need?
Although you may not need it: google calendar also integrates with thunderbird, and ms-outlook, and syncs with your blackberry calendar.
You can also schedule an appointment using your cellphone using the Jott service:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/12/05/jott-to-your-google-calendar/
The US federal government has successfully used gmail to handle 38,000 accounts, spread across 86 agencies; and saved a substantial amount of money.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/151399/gov_waste_google_apps.html?tk=rss_news
Some of these questions have already been covered
but listed below is a list I've been saving for
just such a meeting.
Mike Honeycutt
==============
1. Is the service free with advertisements? How much screen
space does the ads take? Other costs (conversion, yrly maintainence, etc.)?
How long is it "free"?
2. What is the quota and how is it enforced?
3. Is there any backup/restore option if a message is deleted?
4. Are the advertisements targeted to keywords in
each email? If so, what is Microsoft's privacy policy?
5. Who do you call with problems? What is response time? 24/7 support?
6. Assume spam/virus checking is included?
7. Are certain attachments blocked?
8. How long can students keep the account once they
graduate/drop out?
9. How easy is it to get out of the service? How do you
get the (gigabytes?) of old mail if you bring the
service back in house? How do you get the *gigabytes* of
existing mail on the new service?
10. Is IMAP and POP supported?
11. What happens when students leave for summer
and their quotes become overdrawn?
12. Are there FERPA issues?
13. Do you have options for campus-wide email
distribution lists (all students, all faculty, etc.)?
14. Is there Exchange-type options - shared calendars, task lists, etc.
for Outlook users?
15. Who does the RIAA, Secret Service, etc. contact if they
have questions about emails being sent from a student's address?
16. How do you get the student names to them? Format? How long to setup?
17. Finally, why choose the Microsoft solution over the Google solution?
18. What browsers will it not work with?
19. How are password changes handled?
20. When are email accounts (and messages) deleted?
21. Students only? Faculty, Staff, Alumns, Retirees?
22. Name changes (marriage, divorce) and re-admits (is original email
address still available?).
23. Can students forward their mail to another server (hotmail)?
24. Black list - if UNCA.google is banned, how to resolve
zimbra.com , its got better features than google and better stability and interoperability than outlook, its widely deployed, baked by commercial vendors and support, and its open-source unlike the other vendors----it is owned by yahoo so maybe thats what their pitching you, id go with that, unless all you want is email and then maybe google
Our organization is currently switching our messaging system as well. We have 3 main offices. One is an all MS shop, so Exchange with outlook. Another office is a Novell shop, so Groupwise 7. The last office is much smaller, and until recently were just POP3 from an external host. All of us are now switching to Google Apps. We're a charity so we get it for free, which is nice. My office is the exchange office, and I've got about 15% of our 60 users switched to Google Apps. So far our biggest issue is contacts. There is no good way to do shared address lists (at least in the education edition). Since google doesn't have any good tools to help with outlook, we're using a 3rd party tool called oggsync. It allows us to sync contacts and calendars with outlook. A good chunck of our users will want to keep using outlook because they are so used to it, and some are on planes so often they will want offline access to compose messages. oggsync, and the other 3rd party programs currently can't do multiple contact lists though, they just lump everyone together which is a pain. Overall, the people swapped over so far are liking it.
I think you are having two account books here. I will accept your numbers (why I shouldn't?) but I can't accept your conclussion: even if your higher quota costs US$500.000, that's a one shoot cost for (probably) between three and five fiscal years; that's peanuts.
That is NOT a one-shot cost.
Typically, for every $1 that direct storage costs you, backups cost you between $2-3 for that same unit. And that is NOT a one time cost.
As the amount of data you handle goes up, your management cost goes up too. You hope that you achieve economies of scale when you grow, and the percentage of what it costs you to manage goes down, but the actual dollar cost still goes up.
And $500k is NOT peanuts, even to a large state University. Especially when state funding is going down across the country every year.
Many Universities are seeing budgets shrinking every year right now. In that scenario $500k is not trivial.
Even accepting that you will save 250.000US$/year (which I have problems to accept without see the detailed numbers) that's not a for-profit company, that's a f* University.
For a University with 50k active accounts (so figure 30-50k students) 6-figures per year to run an email in-house is very reasonable. Thats not an outrageous number.
Going to University (and maintaining them) is more expensive that not going or having them, at least on the short term, isn't it? While not the main point, one of the very points of having universities (and/or technical colleges) is in order to "try to scale Cyrus"; it's not per chance that Cyrus itself comes from a University.
Building IT experience or testing an open-source mail product is utterly and completely NOT the point of having a University. Now you may get a grant to do one of those things, and run it through the University, and thats fine. But the state or endowment funds that go to run the things needs to be spent first and foremost on teaching students.
Your priorities are completely out of whack with reality. Universities run on a zero-sum economic situation. So which classes should be cancelled or faculty not be hired to run that mail system? Thats the choice. It's not just 'the tax system will fund it'. Thats not how it works.
Thats a nice attempt to work it out, but it completely misses what is often the biggest cost: PEOPLE.
Will those drives install themselves? The project has to be planned, equipment needs to be purchased, communications need to happen, downtime has to be scheduled, new equipment installed, tested, and then dealt with when there are problems. The larger systems require an incremental increase in staff to manage.
Not to mention the rank insanity of running 1TB+ spindles in a system like that which is pure disk I/O limited. It'll be slow, and you'll take out alot of people when spindles fail. Thats not how you design real systems.
Wow. Please trust me when I say that this would be a terrible, terrible decision.
Just the storage, backup, disaster-recovery, and bandwidth cost to support 30-50k students, and the associated management costs, assuming all open-source software, will be mid 6-figures yearly.
You also seem to be confusing an SMTP server with email storage, mailboxes, spam & virus protection, backups, etc etc.
It does NOT cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in people to manage 4 freaking Thumpers in 16 RU, 28 inches of rack space. If you think it does, you would never succeed in founding a startup that has to be as efficient as possible.
This is a very interesting subject. The university (Appalachian State Universty, 15,000+ students) that I am going to now has recently switched to using Google for their email. Last year they actually upgraded to a newer version of the email system they already had from Sun. However, it was a huge MESS. Servers were down for days and people were losing their email, etc. I guess someone got tired of the mess with the email and not being able to communicate anymore. Well, anyway, all of the new freshman this year received new google email accounts and other accounts on campus are being moved over time over to google. I am not sure what is so hard about managing a reliable email system. It is not like email is a new technology. I know that email servers have to have a lot of storage and adequate capacity to handle email for a campus this size. However, last fall's mess with problems weeks later after the switch over aggravated everyone including myself.
I see you didnt notice my second paragraph. Running that size of a load in 4 thumpers with gigantic 1TB or bigger drives is not reasonable. These are machines in which every spindle is hammered 24x7, and you are completely I/O bottlenecked at all times, against those drives.
As you move to bigger drives, the number of concurrent users queued up against reads & writes on a given spindle goes way up. Plus the pain/cost/downtime when each drive fails goes way up, as you have so very many mailboxes on each drive.
What would you say it costs for people, even if we assume your non-practical big-drive solution? Are you seriously suggesting that its zero? You need to include the costs for purchasing people (since that size of a purchase requires an RFP unless you already have an exclusive contract at a university), the setup, installation, migration, support techs to deal with end-users when the problems happen. Plus in addition to the low end techs who do some of the work, you need some actually good people (which are very rare in higher ed) to deal with the hard problems.
Then you have to deal with tape backup systems (which usually cost 2-3x the storage cost per unit), and increased power cooling and bandwidth load in both your primary and secondary datacenter.
Regarding your startup company comment, you're right! Running a startup IS different than running email services for 30-50k users in a University environment. That should not be a surprise. I dont see how its germane to the conversation though.
For what its worth, I do own my own business, and as stated above, I do run it differently than I ran IT at large organizations. This should also not be a surprise to anyone.
I don't know what you might mean by "legacy systems", but unless you're using something completely anachronistic (no SMTP, no POP or IMAP), it's not so "legacy" that it wouldn't be fixable and expandable internally.
If you've got POP/SMTP/IMAP capability in your existing infrastructure and it isn't "scaling" you're either doing something wrong and/or the physical infrastructure isn't substantial enough to deal with it.
There is a handful of "snap in" products out there which would allow you do have any number of services, even "Microsoft compatible", if that tickles your winky. Take Zarafa, for instance: it's an "exchange replacement", with email, calendaring, contacts, and tasks - more than 90%+ of campus students are likely to utilize, and substantial enough for the other 10% and the adventurous professors. It integrates with existing Windows infrastructure, and
Personally, I'd say go that route over anything Microsoft would offer you. Seriously, it's not even an argument worth making if you can't figure it out on your own. Which would you rather put on your resume: "Helped pick Microsoft mail and calendaring system replacement for campus" or "Planned, designed, and implemented Zarafa information gateway for campus" (or similar, in either situation)?
Failing that, there are dozens of other web-based mail/calendar systems available. Some even tailored to things like project management, which can be useful - and they can all be tailored to the specific needs of the university.
As far as picking from the three you've got, I'd pick Google without even thinking about it (if for no other reason than the fact that that's what students are familiar with).
I'd only have one question for them: what benefits can your product offer us which can not be realized through the efforts of students? If you really need whatever benefit they mention, and you can't get it from a student's efforts, regardless of time-to-implement (within reason) there's no reason to consider their product.
If a person honestly and objectively looks at the costs involved (even if it's just software, or hardware), Microsoft products are the last choice you'd want. For a larger campus you'd be looking at, what... 20, 30 servers for Sharepoint? More?
A university SHOULD NOT be paying for vendored software, in my opinion. Implementing these sorts of things for work experience is the rough equivalent to a "work study" in some other field, and not allowing students to (at least!) install existing stuff and maintain it is paramount to giving preferential treatment to the other science disciplines which, you know, get hands on experience (biology, forestry, chemistry, etc.).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Yes it is reasonable to run 4 Thumpers with 1-TB drives. Read the OpenSolaris ZFS mailing list, some people are doing just that.
You are wrong when you say "the number of concurrent users queued up against reads & writes on a given spindle goes way up". Previous situation: 1666 mailbox/drive (60 MB quota, assuming 100-GB drives). With 4 Thumpers: 1000 mailbox/drive (1 GB quota, 1-TB drives). That's actually lower !
Buying/configuring/administering 4 Thumpers for 5 years probably cost $10-20k in people, tops. Maybe as low as $5k if your company is efficient and not full of red-tape crap, such as a startup. A friend of mine (working for one, precisely) just bought a Thumper. He spent a few hours on the phone with Sun negotiating a good price, bought one with the smallest drives, 250 GB, and replaced them with 1-TB ones he bought himself at $130 piece (he wouldn't accept Sun's price of $1000+/TB), this saved him more than $20k. Anyway he expects to spend a week or 2 fine-tuning it, then once in prod maybe he will get a drive failure every other month or so. This is an example where a Thumper is clearly not going to cost much more than $5k in people.
"Then you have to deal with tape backup systems (which usually cost 2-3x the storage cost per unit)" Tape is dead. Tape is being replaced with disk. Part of the reason is precisely because, as you said (!) it costs 2-3x more than disk. (At least we agree on something). Read my original post, I already accounted for a disk-based backup system in my numbers.
As a footnote, some startups do deal with 100k users or more. Hotmail (on-topic, isn't it) had 100k subscribers 3 months after the site launched (source: Founder at Works, quote from Sabeer Bhatia, cofounder of Hotmail).
You try getting a large university to change systems (ANY system).
I defy you.
Years ago, I was the techie for a small ancillary "health" department of McGill U.
I had just recommended and easily converted us to a new system: "Microsoft Mail" - at that point it was only DOS, and was just acquired by Gates and co. from a small Vancouver firm.
Meanwhile big brother, McGill's I.S. dept were using the wonderful Pegasus email system (free and from New Zealand)
Admittedly, Pegasus was a pretty good system, if you are a small set of users, but I could see that MS obviously meant business, and that Email would grow.
As I did not have a PhD or an MBA, and lacked sufficient pretentiousness, no one listened to me.
Not sure what McGill is using these days... Hey maybe they're still using Pegasus! LOL!
Or worse: Lotus-Notes, but really IBM "Notes" (UGH! Double LOL!)
But anyhow, thankfully I'm past all that crap now-
Oops! I forgot! This is an M$-bashing site! Me bad!
.
.
- aqk
F U
"But the state or endowment funds that go to run the things needs to be spent first and foremost on teaching students."
Of course yes!
And I challenge you to find a better (and cheaper) way to teach your IT/CS students about large environments and the nitty-gritties that really makes the damn thing work than providing value services for your own on the tens of thousand users university (of course, you can *seem* to be doing your work and save your face telling you are saving money by outsourcing services that were developed in-house first once there's the chance to get a benefit out of them -as I told you, quite a familiar story lately: socialize the costs, privatize the benefits).
"You also seem to be confusing an SMTP server with email storage, mailboxes, spam & virus protection, backups, etc etc."
Probably because I run my own SMTP server with all needed storage/backup/anti-virus/anti-spam solutions already in the same box.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Wrong. Redundancy wouldn't multiply the cost by 2x.
Why ? I counted 4 Thumpers: 2 act as the active servers, 2 act as the data backup servers. Only the active servers may need system-wise redundancy. The backup servers are fine with disk-wise redundancy (raid mirroring, which I already accounted for).
So even redundancy would only bring the number of Thumpers to 6 (4 for the 1st and 2nd set of storage servers, 2 for backup). This is 48 (TB) * 6 (Thumpers) * 1200 ($/TB) = $346k. Still far from half a mil, and this includes the overestimations of my original post (buy the drives from Dell or OEM and worst case you end up spending $500-600/TB).
The CSU system migrated from Banner to Peoplesoft back in 2004.
And how long did it take them, how long were they talking about it, how much did it cost them, is anything still using the old crap, are people still confused, have all their needs been met, have they lost any functionality, how happy are they, etc.
Obviously stuff happens and things change.
The process is the issue.
It took them 4 years and went over budget. The main noticeable loss was the custom reports written off the old oracle database.
Exactly.
Being a university, you should setup your own servers and use Zimbra mail on them. In the furture, you could consider having student interns maintain the system. Zimbra for me was a very easy install, it has a great web interface complete with collaboration and built in wiki. It is a very simple interface for administrators. Also a web interface. That means access on campus and off for clients and admins. Great system that works very well.