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Yale Delays Move To Gmail
Mortimer.CA writes "The Yale Daily News is reporting that the move to Gmail has been postponed. After further consultations with faculty and staff, the concerns raised 'fell into three main categories: problems with "cloud computing" (the transfer of information between virtual servers on the Internet), technological risks and downsides, and ideological issues.' In the latter category, 'Google was not willing to provide ITS with a list of countries to which the University's data could be sent [i.e., replicated], but only a list of about 15 countries to which the data would not be sent.'"
I would be more than a little interested in that list too...
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
Google a list of countries... remove those 15, and there you go.
Could they store the data in the cloud like a RAID 0 array is set up? Only half the bits are on one server vs. another making it harder to extract data if a single server is compromised? Are they already doing something like this?
Wait a second, you mean all my emails and documents stored at Google are actually being stored in places where they can be examined by anyone?
Yale Moves to Destroy GMail
Which would probably make a somewhat more interesting read.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I would delay the move for aesthetic and functional issues like:
1: Why can't I simply move from composing an email to the many labels without being warned about losing my work? Yahoo figured this out and so should Gmail.
2: The interface is still wanting big time. Heck this is 2010!
3: Though Gmail's search is fast, filtering is still so basic. YahooMail's filter is good. Google can surely do better. When I search for an email from someone, I would like the opportunity to filter further "on the fly"...in real time...say by attachment type if any, subject and so on. Currently the filter functionality does not cut it!
4: Sorting by sender, subject, time of arrival etc is non existent! This is on a service that prides itself on users never having to delete email! For those with tens of thousands of email, Gmail is mediocre!
There have been talks at my college, Dartmouth, of scrapping our email system, Blitzmail, and moving to Gmail. I personally like Blitzmail, though I do agree it needs to be updated to meet the needs of the 21st century.
For those who don't know, Blitzmail was one of the first email clients and is almost instantaneous.
I was considering a GAPE deployment for a much smaller organization (about 150 users) and ran into real problems finding answers to some questions. In my particular case I was considering a migration off of Exchange. The exact specifics involved were really vague and often times the suggestion was, "Talk to a solutions provider." I went ahead and talked to two of them. When I pressed them for specifics about GAPE replication of Exchange features (Public Folders for example), I got a lot of vague answers along the lines of either, A. "Well, it can kind of do that." or B. "You don't need to do that because the Google way is better."
The major consideration that turned me away from Google was their support (or seeming complete lack of it). I had a terrible time getting my pre-sales questions answered when I went directly to Google. The "premiere partners" (companies that are trying to make a business based on deploying GAPE for organizations) were just as vague. One of them even admitted to me that they have problems getting answers out of Google about new features, or the status of outstanding issues.
I am subscribed to a thread on Google's forums that details people's real world problems with Google support.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?hl=en&tid=384dd0d72db87c6d
Some of the people are obviously idiots who can't read the documentation. The large majority of them have serious problems that are ignored. Just recently someone mentioned that Google quoted them 5 days to recover an accidently deleted mailbox.
I don't doubt that Google Apps could very well be a great product. The key is that it "could" be a great product. Great products require great support. Great products require a certain ease of implementation and use. As it stands currently, GAPE is more like a beta framework that requires a lot of heavy lifting on the part of an IT department. It is hardly a production ready, polished product that can be sold as a service.
Google was not willing to provide ITS with a list of countries to which the University's data could be sent [i.e., replicated], but only a list of about 15 countries to which the data would not be sent.
Okay, so did ITS compose a list of countries it felt were unacceptable (along with logical reasons for why)? And if so, which countries, specifically, were on ITS' list that weren't on Google's list? Serious, I'd love to know which countries Yale has a beef with that Google doesn't.
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
I hope the Yale Delays that Gmail now has doesn't affect my account!
You better make backups of your Gmail.
What do you do when Google is purchased by China.
Yours In Astrakhan,
Kilgore Trout
If you forced a login with a quick time out for all of those gmail accounts, that's a hell of a lot more secure than storing the documents on your laptop, which can be stolen and broken pretty easily. (These kids aren't going to password protect bootup and encrypt the hard drive. ) If you need an e-mail even if the internet is down, it should probably be in your notes in your word processor anyway. And unless you're not going to use WiFi, you are already sending your data over insecure connections.
And if you think other ISPs don't give up your data already... well, you're just not paying attention.
If you want to use and share data on the internet, there are risks. If you want to remember something that cannot possibly be intercepted by a third party, write it down on a piece of paper, put it in a safe, and hope no one steals the safe.
The Family Educational Right to Privacy Act.
Seems to me that Yale is under the purview of this law, and therefore must have control over the disclosure of student records.
Does Gmail still do grepping of the emails for targeted advertising in these corporate-agreement hosting situations? If so...big problem. At my college, I can't even send an email to a student unless its sent from/to an address in our internal, private (https only) webmail system.
How about the point number 11 on the tos ???
http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS
So, if you use Google for search, you can buy a "Google search appliance" and install it in your machine room and use that to provide your service.
I really, really want the same thing for Google Apps. The question of whether storing a document in "Google Docs" violates FERPA or something simply doesn't come up if the box is sealed in a room on a private network that you have tight control over. Running our own GMail and Google Calendar server appliances in our machine room just wouldn't make the lawyers nearly as nervous as a move to "the cloud".
The concerns about the Google cloud need to be weighed against Yale's current system. Every system has vulnerabilities.
Whatever countries they are worried about, are they sure that people from those countries can't hack into their systems and find what they are after more easily then they can do same for Google's systems?
What about the danger from someone within Yale's organization (one of the most common threats)? Is that worse with Gmail or with their current system?
One of the big points of contention for [MAJOR UNIVERSITY I HAPPEN TO WORK FOR] is getting the vendor to guarantee data stays on US soil.
The bottom line is that if people buy into Google now, we won't get the guarantee. If people hold out, or go to other vendors that can promise that, Google will cave.
Good on Yale. Now stop making your students kill themselves.
It would be pathetic if Yale, one of the richest schools, can't spare some fund to maintain its own email system. Tuition there is, what, approaching 40k a year?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Other reasons hold me off:
The gmail solution in Apps doesn't allow for shared inboxes. Does anyone know a way around this??
Say some public email address that 4 people (a team) has access to, without duplicating *shudder* emails 4 times and losing track.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
A school I applied to (Lakehead in Thunder Bay), uses gmail. As far as I can remember there is a certain amount of data that a university deals with cannot be transferred out of Canada due to our privacy laws. I hope they don't fall afoul of that.
When will people realize that there is no such thing as privacy on the internet?
We're going through this same conversation at my employer (a higher-ed liberal arts university). This article came up yesterday in my team, and we had a bit of a discussion about it. Here's the email I sent out to the group about the article and Yale's decision. Hopefully this will help to clear up some of the misinformation in the article.
I'm considering doing this for a small business I support.
It's about 15 users and they currently run exchange, I'm tired of supporting it and frankly too lazy, people keep suggesting google handling the mail.
I've set up a test domain and used Outlook and Thunderbird to connect to it via IMAP (that's the right way to do it, right?)
I'm in Australia on ADSL2 links, 20mbit and 16mbit are the 2 I've tested from, the performance seems 'laggy' and I'm curious what the cache implimentation of Outlook 2007 is like?
I want the users experience to be very close to what they get with exchange or at least comparable.
The users have huge mailboxes (most of their work is email - a LOT of communications) so they need massive mailboxes - the smallest is 1gb and some of them have them in the 15gb range. (Please, please don't tell me 'you're doing it wrong' or 'users need to be trained to XYZ' - this is how they work, this works for them and helps them get stuff done better, it needs to be this way) :/ Does anyone know a way around this or plans for it to change? :/
Now the first major issue, besides the lag on IMAP is the folder limitation google have in place. I can create folders and subfolders and more subfolders but the path depth for the folders is quite shallow compared to an outlook PST. This is due to 'folders' being implimented via tags on gmail
I agree the users shouldn't have ridiculous folder depth but they really do need fairly extensive folder information
\name of project\name of company\name of person\ for example is pretty difficult to do via IMAP Gmail
Anyone else have some overall general comments about moving to externally hosted mail with google (or someone else?)
my school moved the student emails to gmail. They used to have an exchange server but they were never quite smart to lock it up, so it was better in general imo. Gmail also supported IMAP which they didn't have enabled when their had their own servers for students.
That's cool.
Google is great and all...... but uhhhhh, they have a massive potential for abuse from soooo many angles. :(
I'm glad that at least a few institutions are refraining from getting sucked into the hive.
Nice to see Yale sum up my problems with cloud computing.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
OK, so there are "about 15" countries Google says they won't send your data to?
Here's the solution: Take the list of 203 sovereign states, and knock out the "about 15" that are on Google's "we don't like you, nyah nyah a boo boo" list. Presto, you now have the list of countries to which Google may send your data.
The geniuses at Yale couldn't figure this out? (I guess that isn't entirely surprising, given that they seem to be having trouble counting to 15...)