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Colleges Outsourcing Email To MS Live, Google
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Nov 27, 2007 06:42 PM
from the who-uses-email-anyway dept.
from the who-uses-email-anyway dept.
Andy Guess tips us to his article at Inside Higher Ed offering a detailed look at the snowballing trend of colleges outsourcing their email infrastructure, mostly to Google and Microsoft Live. Even outsourcing just email would presage big changes in the work that IT departments do on campus; but more such changes are on the horizon as schools grapple with entering freshmens' already entrenched online habits.
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Submission: More colleges outsource e-mail to Google & MS. by Anonymous Coward
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Outsourcing it? (Score:5, Funny)
This might not be good.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This might not be good.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Privacy is our biggest issue with the Gmail for students pilot program. No ads, sure, but mail is still being bot-scanned and some of it is sensitive information which, by policy, is not to be allowed off the campus infrastructure. Those are the hurdles we're working around with Google.
Parent
Re:This might not be good.... (Score:5, Informative)
Sure it can, just use https://mail.google.com/ [google.com] I use better gmail for firefox so even if I forget it only goes to the SSL protected site.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:This might not be good.... (Score:4, Informative)
Already done 4000 user accounts, and now doing more 44000 for all users.
Google Rocks.
About the network Connection, we have 3 data links (one radio, 2 fibre). The downtime by year is very little.
Only students will have a Google Account, all the teachers and administrative will continue using in-house solutions.
(we have to take more control, backups, logs, etc..)
We did a small survey and 80% of all users choose Highly satisfied using Google.
Microsoft is another history, you have to pay for License to have a in-house server syncing with your AD (SQL Server + MIIS)..
And if you do not want ads, have to pay (Google Education is free and you can take out the ads..)
About APIs: Google has the single-sign , easy, open, and I can choose (Java,Python,Net,etc.)
And now google has made avaliable APIs to migration and Reports, they keep evolving the product..
security: How many Security Bugs Google Apps had VS others MTAs??
I will ask them for a job or a commission there..
Parent
Not so strange (Score:5, Informative)
Get off my lawn (Score:3, Interesting)
So I wonder why these days any American Uni would want their intellecual property transmitted over google.cn routers?
The whole country going down the tubes, looks like.
Re: (Score:2)
Mod parent up.
We have thought of this (Score:4, Informative)
My two main issues:
1. If (when) M$ starts charging for this down the road, then what? They could charge virtually anything they wanted for us to get our e-mails back if we didn't like their new price.
2. We do sometimes lose connection to the internet, internal e-mail will no longer work
Re:We have thought of this (Score:5, Informative)
Other things to consider:
How much of your mail goes outside, and how much stays inside? We had a lot of internal traffic, often sometimes quite heavy (large attachments etc) and it would have been pointless sending this out over the wan only to have it come straight back in again...
What is your privacy policy? And what kind of data is sent over email? If your sending students' personal details etc around you might not have their permission to send/store them off-campus on equipment not owned by the college.
How much storage will users want/need? Disk space is cheap these days...
Can you keep a local backup? You should demand this really, have some ability to pull incremental backups of the mail spools in a standard format so that you have a workable exit strategy if you want to switch services or move it back inhouse. You need to be able to do this centrally, not rely on each user to download all the mails to their clients - most wont.
Is access to mail provided via the methods you need (imap, pop3 etc)?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And so it starts (Score:2)
gmail/school (Score:2, Informative)
Re:gmail/school (Score:4, Informative)
And that is just what I personally use. Outlook, Evolution, and others have similar features. GMail's web interface is interesting, but you can only go so far with a web interface, and I really don't see the attraction of a web interface over a mature, integrated email program. My university made a big deal out of an upgrade to a new web interface for our email, and I just yawn seeing "new" features that I've been using since high school.
Parent
10 years ago... (Score:2)
At it seems they still are using it [unl.edu], at least 10 years later. (Even some of the old pages [unl.edu] still exist.) Most recent news: attachment size limit has been scaled back to 120 MB "to increase productivity and reliablity". If I hadn't linked it, you could have found it by searching for that misspelling (and two other hits for the phrase, sadly).
Surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as one of those alleged incompetent educational IT directors, I'm not seeing a lot of value in this. Email costs us next to nothing now. Let's see, I have 40,000 active accounts now on one server, using Cyrus, dspam, clam-av, and policyd. All the software is free so the cost is basically a new server every three years and some storage space on the SAN (email is a very small portion of space on the SAN so freeing it up won't buy us much).
Yeah, if I had an Exchange farm and a dedicated staff to manage it, then outsourcing it would be enticing. As it is now, it'd be more work to figure out how to migrate people away from a tried-and-true solution as well as the privacy and FERPA issues than it is to let it ride as is, and if people do something stupid like delete a folder, we can easily restore it from backup in short order.
In-house also means being able to use a single-sign on solution for all campus services. Same ID, sign in once using CAS (Central Auth Service -- another freebie package)
(We do provide an interface for users to forward their emails to their preferred provider. No one is forcing them to use us.)
Now what I would like to do is outsource shared calendaring service with seamless syncing to a plethora of mobile devices. That's a need that hasn't been adequately addressed in-house. ie, before fixing stuff that's not broken, how about helping with services that fix what *is* broken!
btw, news flash, people under 20 don't use email much anyway. It's basically the tool of "old people." Email is busted in many ways and will probably die as a platform in the future anyway. I say let it ride as is until then.
Now get off my lawn.
Re:Surprising... (Score:4, Informative)
Benefit 1. Federal and State Compliance. The equation is this: if we don't house the email, we don't have to deal with the legal issues of keeping it. Patriot Act archiving requirements, the implications of hacks, etc. all become someone else's problem.
Caveat 1: I would never outsource faculty or staff accounts, because of FERPA (Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act) requirements. Frankly I am not sure if I could even legally do this, because I can't ensure that the hosting service will honor the very strict requirement of the act. This means that even if we were to put this together we would still run Exchange in-house, for the few hundred accounts that remain.
Benefit 2: Academic Freedom. Is a student's email cannot be accessed by the college, then they cannot accuse us of infringing on their academic freedom. This is very important to some people, to the extent that they avoid sending certain kinds of emails through the campus system. In a lot of schools around the country, students have strange ideas that we monitor everything that they say. We don't (although I can't vouch for other schools) but you just can't tell someone this.
Caveat 2: Just because we don't do it, doesn't mean that it can't be done by the host. See Benefit/Caveat 1.
Benefit 3: Spam filtering. I don't care how much you like your spam filter, Gmail and Hotmail will probably beat it. Why? They have hundreds of billions of test cases to work their software on.
Caveat 3: Some users like a fine grained control over their spam filters, and the approach that these vendors use may not be to everyones liking. This is especially true of anyone who has ever lost an important message because of a false positive.
Parent
I am very alarmed by this development (Score:5, Interesting)
I am forced to use the college e-mail address for some administrative stuff. How is it reasonable that this also forces me to accept some third party's terms and rules? If I *wanted* GMail's services, then it is fair game that I would have to accept their terms. But if all I want to do is forward my e-mails and get them off the service as fast as possible, there should be a shortcut way that routes the e-mails around Google's servers, prohibiting Google from having a peek inside. College has picked a third party here and is forcing me to enter into a contract with them. This isn't right.
Re:I am very alarmed by this development (Score:5, Funny)
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Parent
think the kids have problems now (Score:5, Insightful)
What about a record of every email they sent in college. Every threat to a competing lover, every breakup, every plan to falsify grades.
The nice thing about email on a schools server is that the mail is presumably gone when the student leaves college. OTOH, google promises to keep a copy of everything ever created on it's server.
Missed learning experience (Score:3, Interesting)
If we remove the educational value of students interacting with each other and learning both skills and morals they will need to function in the outside world for the rest of their lives, we might as well outsource the whole university instead of just the e-mail system. Why not just have some good professors from India read the lecture and answer questions through online chat? Will certainly save students some money...
We do this here. (Score:4, Informative)
To clear up a few misconceptions:
1. Ads are turned off for our domain. Nobody will see a google ad in their email client.
2. There is POP and IMAP support just like the normal gmail accounts.
3. It is the most stable beta I've ever seen.
The reason I pushed this is that it is relatively easy and their spam and virus filtering are way better than anything we tried here. I am the only one of the four IT staff that has a serious clue as to running a successful email system and I plan on leaving soon to pursue other opportunities as they say. Gapps is easy for my boss and the other support staff to manage.
We are on connection that has not gone down for an unplanned outage since it was installed in May. Our previous connections were almost as stable with less than 10 minutes of downtime in a year.
It is speedy, it is ubiquitous, and it is cost effective. If students have privacy concerns they can learn how to forward stuff to a POP account someplace else and delete the mail from the gmail box.
Not for non-US Institutions (Score:5, Interesting)
Given some of the recent claims from Mr. Bush and co. even having the servers located in Canada would not be sufficient protection as long as it was a US company owning them. So, despite Google's excellent technical product and general trustworthiness, I don't see many countries where there are any sort of privacy laws being able to sensibly use it. In fact the university are very uncomfortable with faculty using personal GMail accounts for exactly the same reason.
Entrenched habits? (Score:5, Interesting)
Gmail appliance? (Score:3, Interesting)
They already have a search appliance. Why not a standalone email appliance that schools and businesses could install, hook it up to gobs of storage space, and there ya go? Hell, make a whole standalone Google Apps appliance, and tear Exchange a new one. You get to keep the email in-house, plus with great search, but with the Google stamp of goodness. I'd give an arm and a leg for this!
Google Should Pay Up (Score:3, Insightful)
My school does this (Score:4, Informative)
It's pretty much like regular Hotmail (5gigs of space), but we use the school's
The advantage is that, well, now we have an e-mail provider. A few years ago, my school didn't offer e-mail for students at all, so anything that required an
The disadvantage is
But that all pales next to the truly horrid spam filter. Far more often than not, it has flagged legitimate e-mails as spam and spam e-mails as legitimate. The only way to even KNOW that you're missing an e-mail that is stuck in spambox hell is to log in to your account. Nothing is forwarded out, and THERE'S NO WAY TO DISABLE IT COMPLETELY. So half my real e-mails get caught in the spam filter, rendering the entire account totally useless.
It may be free, but I'm not sure it's worth the price.
Re:Takes a load off IT. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, that's not entirely true but IT in Higher Ed certainly does not function like it does everywhere else and hosted solutions (of any application genre) are going great guns in Higher Ed because of the slow response times with IT.
It's a serious cash cow for the companies that host these services (like RightNow and TimeTrade to name just two of the dozen that I have dealt with as part of my job in the last 6 months) because Higher Ed is so willing to slough this stuff off on someone else and pay the maintenance fees rather than having to rely on the overworked in-house IT staff.
The unfortunate part of having a hosted solution is the maintenance fees. With a hosted CRM solution requiring an 8% yearly fee to keep up with upgrades and hosting/service fees, college budgets are dwindling for the departments that rely on this software for day-to-day activities.
The biggest problem will come in ~2014 as the enrollment decline hits the big time and colleges are scrambling to spend more of their limited budgets on marketing to their high-quality leads and keeping up with all the budgets of those higher-end schools. It should be interesting
Parent
Re:Takes a load off IT. (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Takes a load off IT. (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked at a higher ed institution and supported a network of about a dozen or so other higher ed institutions, and saw what was going on. This just wasn't the case at all. The problem all of them had was management buy-in for solutions. They all had IT professionals who in many cases out-classed their private sector counterparts, who had no problem running email servers which could both block spam and hold up to heavy usage. Their problem, really, was that management usually wouldn't support something they didn't understand, and believed anything printed on an 8x10 glossy.
So, email servers with nearly perfect track records were replaced with exchange servers and all the broken functionality/features therein. Upgrading network equipment, managing a network (WAN and LAN), inventorying a cable plant, securing web servers (MS salesbots also assured many of the PHBs IIS was already secure), and a host of other initiatives that IT staff tried to do at a number of institutions got little to no support/buyin from management. Which at least at those institutions the move to yahoo mail, gmail, and hotmail amongst staff and students became widespread.
From what I could tell, the real problem wasn't a lack of skill in the IT staff, but a lack of support starting at the top of most institutions I saw.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Speak for yourself, buddy.
Fran Taylor, MIT '89
Take a load off!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
You are so right. Really, the only way to measure a person's worth is to do a Google search on what you think is their name.
I don't see the words "typical" or "average" in what I quoted. You've fabricated "meaning in average in aggregate..." on your own.
I was also an MIT employee for a year, and MIT paid me back ALL that I paid to them in four years.
True story: my boss and I were messing with the web cams on our spiffy SGI workstations very late one night. After ma
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It would've been hunky dory, if it were possible to not have to deal with the advertisements and other crap, that supports these "free" services...
Well, if you don't care,
Re:Takes a load off IT. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure about Microsoft's solution, but Google Apps for Education allows you to turn off the advertisements for your students...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Higher Ed. Has below average skills in handling their own IT Infrastructure.
I'd have to take serious issue with a rather gross over-generalization like that. I know many universities with rather pitiful IT services and many with infrastructure that challenges those of Fortune companies. Even in my area you can look at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (a liberal arts school often cited as being one of the the best public universities in the nation overall) whose "IT" infrastructure is limited to the networked computers on campus, wireless access points around camp
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just sayin', that's all.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't have to do that. Use IMAP with a low quota and make the students store their own mail on their own computers. You can sell extra capacity for those who prefer to store email on the server, and turn your email operation into a revenue stream.
Re:Takes a load off IT. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Why give email addresses at all? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why give email addresses to students at all now?
Back when I was in college in the 90's, it made sense for colleges to give students an email address, because in the early to mid 90's, Internet usage still wasn't widespread. Email was a strange and foreign novelty to most then. My first email address was supplied by my school, and I had to physically go to the computer lab to access my mail on a green or orange colored dumb terminal with text-only displays (hey, that was actually fun, though).
Now, the Internet is everywhere, and just about everyone has several email addresses, most of them from free services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or Hotmail. Why give a kid yet another email address to keep track of, one that will be taken away from them after graduation?
Why not just require a student to supply an email address when they first arrive, and use that? Then it stays in the admin records, and whenever a new class roster is created each semester, each instructor/grad assistant/professor will be supplied with their students' email addresses along with names, phone numbers, etc.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You CAN force people to download their email and clear it from the server with IMAP. Like I said, you can make a school operation like this pay for itself by providing barebones service for free and charging for extra storage space.
Re:Takes a load off IT. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah... don't use it? Or just use it for whatever campus-specific courseware that requires it.
But seriously, any student who thinks their email is private (third-party or not) is in serious denial. Heck, just connecting to the school's network pretty much compromises any non-encrypted request or transmission...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, let's pay to SELL OUT our students! What a brilliant idea. If some BANK came to your school, and said hey we'll help out a bit with your accounting department functions if you will just make sure all your students use our BANK, you'd look at them like they were insane. However when it comes to selling out students to be captive CONSUMERS of a big evil email vendor, people see few problems. Can't you see the business of MS and Google is NOT EMAIL?
Zippy, is that you?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I used to use Hotmail, and lost it all. (Score:3, Informative)
Needless to say, now I use my university's pop email server and download the emails locally - and back them up. I will never trust my personal archives to a company like that again.