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.

This might not be good....

[webmaster404]

This might not be good for campuses that may experience network outages. With servers on campus, at least messages could be sent via the network rather then the internet, but now, if the internet is down, Live or Google goes down (possible for Live far-fetched though for Google) or MS (or possibly Google) decides to charge for a "premium" account that takes away features from the "free" counterpart. And also, if MS's or Google's web-mail system gets exposed to security venerabilities, it could be just as insecure as Outlook or IE.

Re:Takes a load off IT.

[garcia]

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

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 :)

Re:This might not be good....

[lymond01]

Working for a university, I'd say that our Internet connection goes down less often than our infrastructure goes down, even though that's usually local to an area or building on campus (temporary bridge loop, etc). And even if the University connection to the Internet is down, students can still go off-campus to get email (coffee shop, etc). The "Internet", or a pipe towards some Gmail server somewhere, being completely down is a rare occasion.

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.

Get off my lawn

[megaditto]

Really? Long time ago, my university used to have a strict policy about electronic transmission of things like student grades or research data...

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:Takes a load off IT.

[jellomizer]

Well it is true depending on the college... 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. The issue of Paying say the maintenance fee vs. keeping a full staff is often cheaper when you figure out everything. First when there is a problem you can rather quickly get an experience or at least trained person to look and resolve the problem in a couple hours vs. Having some hourly wage guy spending days while higher ups are breathing down the necks to get it working. Also there is an issue of budgeting having a fixed budget for the year is better then needing to ask for emergency cash. Colleges have far more wast effecting the departments then an IT Budget that some strategic maintenance contracts. Mostly because every year they need to spend their entire budget just so they will have it for the next year, causing some department to be strapped for cash but for other who don't need it for that year but the next to go hog wild and wast as much as possible so they can get more the next year.

Re:We have thought of this

[Paul Pierce]

For us it is hard to say just how much internal email is worth. We do get hit by spyware/viruses that can slow the internet to a crawl for the students, but there are 2 main cases that are very common for us to need internal email:

1 - A student has a nasty virus or is doing something real bad so we block them. They can still get to all of their shared drives and their email. Makes it a lot easier to send them an email explaining why they can't get out.

2 - A student refuses (or isn't a student) to register on our network. They don't like our policy for whatever reason, or don't want to risk getting viruses online. They can still send/receive mail from teachers and other students.

I am very alarmed by this development

[cos(x)]

My university is in the process of switching to GMail. The old home-grown system was abysmal at best, but I was simply forwarding all e-mails to my private address and never worried about it. With that system about to be shut down next week, I set up the GMail account I am forced to get today - and I find it really troubling that I had to do so. All I want is to forward my e-mail to my private address again. I have absolutely no interest in Google's services, in their Spam filtering or nifty webmail interface. GMail does offer forwarding. I enabled it and expect never to never in my life visit GMail's site again. But before getting this far, I had to accept Google's terms of service and privacy policy.

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.

One good thing

[CWRUisTakingMyMoney]

My school just migrated over to Google Apps, or rather is in the process of migrating. I understand that network outages, though rare, can result in email downtime, or worse, emails lost forever. This is especially bad at my school, where by policy, official communication from the university to students and vice versa is done via email and email only (this may not be at all unique; I really don't know). However, I can see one great side effect of this, and it is that, if all goes according to plan, I will be able to keep my university email address plus storage (on Google servers, true) indefinitely after I graduate. This would be a big help, as I use my university email as my main address, and it would be a big pain to have to change to another address in a year or so.

Missed learning experience

[iamacat]

Students should run their own e-mail systems, period. Otherwise, how can IT students prepare for their real life work in future in a realistic environment? Sure the security will not be as tight as an offsite system. But, it is educational by itself to learn how to telnet to port 25 and send a hoax e-mail from Jesus Christ or from your professor. So is catching the hoaxer by looking at the message paths or catching a student admin reading others e-mails and putting him/her to public shame. Most of all, it's a critical part of education to realize that just because you can look at other people's files does not mean you should.

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...

Re:Let's all SELL OUT our students!

[rubycodez]

because colleges and universities don't use their students as a captive market? at least with gmail you don't have to buy what they are selling. A school will tell you things to buy and you'd better pay if you want the sheepskin.

Re:Takes a load off IT.

[Celarnor]

Before I go any further, I'm a freshman at RIT, which is a pretty geek-heavy place I also reside on the Computer Science House [wikipedia.org], which is pretty nerdy [rit.edu] as well. Right now we're developing a robot to bring us drinks from a networked vending machine to our room, if that helps you any. Despite our extensive use of *NIX elsewhere, we use an Exchange server for email, which works fairly well. Most students just use the web frontend for it, or just forward it to their gmail account. Myself, I use IMAP with it, but it is frequently borked, and requires the installation of a security certificate for use off-campus. That said, a lot of students here have trouble figuring out how to forward x11 traffic and a different username via ssh, much less use pine; our UNIX cluster does have it installed, but I have my doubts about how many people use it.

Not for non-US Institutions

[Roger W Moore]

Apparently we looked at it for the University I work at here in Canada but the administration rejected it out of hand. Everyone loved the technical aspects of GMail - the problem was that it was run by a US company. This means that the US government has the ability to force emails to be handed over which, in almost all circumstances, would be a violation of Canadian privacy laws thus leaving the university in very hot water.

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?

[mswope]

"as schools grapple with entering freshmens' already entrenched online habits." Since when has this been a problem, let alone a priority for schools? Did schools somehow become democracies that care what the students previous habits were in things like email? How does it teach them anything, if they don't expose them to different environments and conditions that don't conform to what they do in their bedrooms at home? What will happen to them in the corporate world, or military world, or just about any workplace that has a modicum of technology "to deal with?"

Gmail appliance?

[edmicman]

Wouldn't this perfectly suit a gmail appliance? Personally, I think Gmail's interface for webmail is the best out there. I ended up biting the bullet and moving my personal domain to their free hosted services because I can't offer 5GB of email space to my friends with standard hosting, nor offer the reliability of gmail. But I still have in the back of my mind that ultimately everything is on Google's servers. They're probably better able to handle maintenance than me, but still.

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!

Re:Takes a load off IT.

[amsr]

Whether to use outsourced webmail for students or not is one issue, but categorizing "higher ed" as universally having below average skills in IT is totally wrong. I went to school at a large Big Ten institution and from my experience as both a student and as one of those "college students who needed spending cash" who worked in IT there, I have to say I was very impressed. They never had service outages, their connections were lightning fast, and the services provided were pretty much everything you needed and nothing you didn't. The in house solutions were creative and well thought out. After all, many of the "students who needed cash" IT people in college (like myself) were CS/CSE majors who actually understood the fundamentals of how systems worked, and ended up working for the very vendors that ended up making the products used when they graduated.

After I graduated, I went on to work at a large IT consulting/systems integrator that worked in the business/government space. I have to say that in my professional life I have run into many more "business" IT managers or workers who fit the "below average skills" category than I ever met in college. The decisions made in business IT just make me cringe compared to what I saw at my University. There is much more cost cutting "to make me look good to my boss" in spite of the quality and robustness of solutions, much more reliance on vendors who run rampant pursuing their own goals of lock-in rather than coming up with sensible solutions for their customers, and to be quite honest, a much lower bar for hiring IT staff. Lets face it, its not all that hard to get a job as an IT person in business. You really just have to have an MCSE.

The other thing you might not want to forget is things like LDAP and Kerberos, distributed file systems, cryptography, and in some cases operating systems themselves came out of technology created in University IT labs.

Re:Why give email addresses at all?

[richard.cs]

My university (Exeter, UK) has a policy that "University business should only be conducted using University e-mail accounts (so that it is possible to track whether a message has been sent or received)." Everyone is given an email address based on their username @exeter.ac.uk or @ex.ac.uk (we can use either/both, it seems to be common for universities in the UK to have two domains, a full name and an abbreviated one).

Up until a few years ago everyone had the system you described (06jdoe@...), or something similar at least, however that's been changed due to the number of students with the same names. It's now one based on initials and year with an extra number to differentiate those with the same initials. Mine is rsc206 (second person in 2006 with initials rsc), except my actual initials are R.C.S so clearly there was a typo in there somewhere.

Old accounts still exist and staff seem to get [initial].lastname@...
 

Re:Takes a load off IT.

[shmlco]

"... is also denying the student the choice of maintaining their privacy."

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:Takes a load off IT.

[MECC]

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

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.