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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.
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.
'From:{sender}', 'subject:{subject}', 'after:{mm/dd/yy}' or 'before:{mm/dd/yy}'. Problem solved?
No sir/madam!
By just looking at what you have written, I can conclude that it will not sort! Or will it?
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.
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?)