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.'"

Comments

Know what...

[butterflysrage]

I would be more than a little interested in that list too...

Re:Know what...

[commodore64_love]

So if I'm Dutch and store my downloads from Seventeen in my Google account, and that data makes its way over to the U.S., does that mean I've committed a child porn crime?

Re:Know what...

[John Hasler]

> ...does that mean I've committed a child porn crime?

No, because _you_ have done nothing inside USA jurisdiction. It may mean Google has, though.

Re:Know what...

[The Angry Mick]

If there's one area GMail or any other cloud provider should not be used, it's law firms.

Oh, you'd be surprised how many have already made the switch. My firm's a non-profit, so the costs alone, or lack thereof in GMail's case, are a huge incentive to make a switch. Couple licensing fees with sharp increases in demand for management of issues like retention policies that can vary with statutes of limitations, data loss, time-based archiving, and legal compliance and its easy to understand why a lot of firms are just giving up as the headaches just don't seem worth the effort.

Personally, I'm leery of the, but it's hard to go your boss with a proposed budget of close to $100,000 for an internally managed system versus $0 (and some geek's time) to drop the problem on someone else.

Re:Know what...

[QuantumRiff]

I would be more worried about "If I'm Dutch, and doing something at a research lab at my university" whether its corporate funded, military, or maybe medical research with client data included... Would a nosy sheriff of a county with a large, competing university in the US be able to subpoena my emails, since it might be stored in the US servers?

Re:Know what...

[The Angry Mick]

Fully understand, and didn't take it as turfing.

The problem is that in the non-profit sector you have a long history of going with the lowest common denominator. Since I've been at this firm I've had to fight for things as simple as a "thou shalt not browse the porn" policies. Because they're so technologically "green" there's often not enough of a framework in place on which to build a good system, so there's a high tendency for "rip and replace". The system I've been nursing for the last ten years is such a system, and when I announced we were approaching critical mass, we brought in consultants to analyze what was in use and recommend options based on what the attorneys said they needed.

This is where the costs began to climb. The attorneys recommended systems that would require them to invest as little personal responsibility as possible (think: HAL 9000 level AI). Thanks to some rather unrealistic demands, and some outright paranoia, most all of the vendors came back with quotes in the 100K ballpark, and most of these dictated a complete top-to-bottom overhaul.

Nothing's been decided yet, so we're still mushing through the options looking for cheaper alternatives.

Potential support issues

[dave562]

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.