Colleges Outsourcing Email To MS Live, Google

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.

Takes a load off IT.

[jellomizer]

Lets face it. Higher Ed. Has below average skills in handling their own IT Infrastructure. Their budget is usually enough for one good manager and a bunch of college students who need spending cash. Keeping an email system up an running with blocking Spam is a lot of work normally way above what normal College IT have the skills or resources to do. So Google and Microsoft Live want more email users. So I say let them have it. Just modify the domain name to allow college.edu emails to go to the gmail account and things are all hunky dory. I work for a small business and I have been slowly outsourcing our email to GMAIL its free and it is easier and less work and expense on our end.

Re:Takes a load off IT.

[FranTaylor]

We simply can't provide 5 GB of storage to an account.

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.

Surprising...

[weave]

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.

think the kids have problems now

[fermion]

We talk about the kids facebook profile as a liability when they try to find jobs...

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.

Re:Outsourcing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I go to Arizona State University. This is EXACTLY what has happened here.

Re:What kind of universities are these?

[cos(x)]

Trinity College, Dublin is switching completely to GMail mid next week. So much for European universities protecting their students from corporate interests.

Take a load off!!!

[FranTaylor]

Wow, angry much? Ever heard of a laugh?

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 maybe two or three minutes, there was a LOUD knock on the door. It was a guy from MIT Networking, from the other end of campus, complaining that the subnet mask on one of the machines was not set right.

"Anonymous Coward" pretty well sums it up.

Re:Takes a load off IT.

[Sepiraph]

I disagree, it is entirely inappropriate for Universities to outsource their emails, since all their students' communications would then be in the hands of 3rd parties. Also Universities would be undoubtly influenced by even more corporate interests. That is definitely a step toward the wrong direction. If anything, Universities need to spend more $ on IT and hired more competent people instead of giving all the $ to the administration.

Re:Takes a load off IT.

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that there are a few good IT Professionals and a bunch of students who think they know it all but don't understand that working in IT isn't all about just getting the computer to work.

A quick check of the IT-related job listings of any university will show that this just isn't true. IT infrastructure at a university (which includes campus-wide e-mail, of course) is not built or managed by students. Perhaps you're thinking of the kids that work in the computer labs? Those labs are just a fraction of the IT requirements of a university, and they certainly aren't setup by students tinkering with a few Windows boxes and some network cable.

There are definitely more than "a few" full-time IT professionals who do the real work behind the scenes. For example, I'm a Unix sysadmin at a mid-sized state university and we have over 400 employees in our IT division. That includes app developers, database administrators, systems analysts, etc. etc. in addition to the core groups which manage systems and networking (which is a couple of dozen people). As someone else pointed out, things definitely work differently than they do in the private sector, but not that differently.

Where do you get the idea that there are just a handful of pros and a bunch of clueless students building/managing university IT infrastructures?

Re:Takes a load off IT.

[timeOday]

Why would anybody pay extra for these wondrous 'extra' email services when gmail and everybody else already offers them for free?

Re:Takes a load off IT.

[CastrTroy]

The fact of the matter is that Google can't provide 5 GB to every single one of their users either. It's all just a ploy to get people to sign up. If every user was using 5 GB, they would not have enough hard drives to hold it all. They know that most people will never use anywhere close to 5 GB. I currently have 1200 messages in GMail, and I'm only using 39 MB. I don't think I've ever deleted a message, I just mark as read, and leave them there. With good spam filtering, it's very unlikely that any student would even reach 1 GB, let alone 5 GB, especially considering that most students are only there for 4 years.

Google Should Pay Up

[More Trouble]

The idea of providing these services "for free" is laughable. Google's business is advertising. What is more valuable to Google than knowing every online activity for a demographic like "recent college graduates"? If Google would like to have access to that data, the Universities should be selling it to Google for what it's worth -- presumably much more than it costs to provide email. Of course, maybe members of the University communities wouldn't like to have their personal information auctioned off to the highest bidder.

:w

Re:Takes a load off IT.

[The Second Horseman]

Huh? I work in higher ed. We have a multi-server, clustered email system hooked up to a fibre channel SAN. Same for file storage. It takes far less than a full-time person to manage either. We've only got a couple of admins to handle the other 60 or so servers - mostly Windows and Linux app servers, some physical, many virtual. We've been using VMware ESX server for more than three years. Oh, yeah, and our IT spending and staffing levels are below average for schools our size. Higher ed pays substantially less than retail for enterprise hardware and software. And I know a lot of folks working in higher ed who are doing similar work.

Offering services doesn't have to be hugely labor intensive, or expensive, if the system is designed well to start.

Why give email addresses at all?

[DesScorp]

"Use IMAP with a low quota and make the students store their own mail on their own computers."

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.

Re:We have thought of this

[imemyself]

Just because bandwidth is cheaper doesn't mean that its suddenly a good idea to access everything over the WAN when its not really necessary. Hosting email servers isn't that hard. People spend more time worrying about how they can save $10 by switching to a webmail service hosted by a third party than they would spend if they just got off their ass and implemented a proper mail environment.

Re:Takes a load off IT.

[MadMidnightBomber]

Maybe if y'all would stop plugging in Linksys wireless access points which think they know better than our DHCP servers, asking for access to data on a server that's been turned off for six months and installing viruses via the no-click virus installation engine (formerly known as Internet Explorer 6) then we could get on with fixing the infrastructure instead of firefighing the whole damn time.

Just sayin', that's all.

Re:Takes a load off IT.

[spyderman4g63]

"Their budget is usually enough for one good manager and a bunch of college students who need spending cash."

Colleges should have all the freaking cash they need to staff one hell of an IT department. I am sure that $40,000 a year for 4-5 years on average per student has to go to something. Where is all this money going?

Wait, I forgot, they have to pay the football coach. My bad.