Yale Switching To Gmail, Not Without Opposition 439
PwnSnake writes "While it makes sense for small (and large) corporations to move to Gmail, something seems amiss when a top private university decides to hand everything over to Google. Although most in that community seem to welcome the change, several organizations on campus have joined forces to call for a transparent process and get students and faculty thinking about the downsides of the switch. The problem is choice (users can already forward mail to Gmail; it doesn't make sense to force that option and not have a backup or opt-out mail server)."
Having gone there... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was a grad student there, and most of the people I knew hated the Horde webmail interface. I practically never used it, since I've always set up IMAP.
My current university also outsources most of their student e-mail services to Google... again, I almost always access it through IMAP. The main downside I've run into is that the university version of Gmail doesn't have access to Labs features that you get with regular Gmail.
Re:Gmail also occasionally goes down (Score:2, Interesting)
They're still more reliable than anything most other people can accomplish.
Re:University IT thinks it's 1994 (Score:2, Interesting)
But, I do feel sorry for the people who still use the interface: it's a freaking Java applet
Re:Having gone there... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Monopoly (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides, it's a deplorable state of affairs when a university can't muster the resources to at least operate an on-site forwarding mail server.
According to TFA, it's going to save 12GB of on site storage per student. If I was a university IT manager and a corporation offered me that *for free*, I'd bite their hand off.
Whoever you are, why spend money when there's an alternative?
Up in arms? Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a service. Just like the phone company, janitorial services, accounting, and insurance.
The students and faculty don't clamor for input and transparency on which payroll company the university uses to issue paychecks and work/study payments, and there's something they use every day. Sounds to me like this is a lesson to be learned for a bunch of college brats who can't adjust to change.
Re:Monopoly (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not free. As you point out, Google is a corporation and they don't do things unless they expect to get something out of it. What Google is getting is a LOT of information about Yale students, staff and faculty.
A step forward (Score:1, Interesting)
Not the only university to do this. My university in Dublin (Trinity College) also switched to gmail and it was met with overwhelming support from students and staff alike. POP, IMAP or web interface that most were used to and that new users welcomed, reduced spam (95% of college mail being spam and exchange filters not catching more than 50% of it), higher level of storage, easier external access, bigger attachments. Overall it was an easy transition and a reduced workload for the syadmins. The only initial problem was different passwords for network access and email, which DOES make a difference for less technical students such as those in arts and letters faculties. Overall it was a step forward with a positive reception from staff, students and sysadmins. Good luck to Yale and let's give it 6 months or so, then poll each of those groups to see if they prefer the gmail way or the old way.
short sighted (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:News flash: you'll never make everyone happy. (Score:5, Interesting)
I looked at that FAQ, and it says that Google employees will never have access to your email unless access is explicitly grated by your admin. It also says, in the same answer, that Google employees may delete things which violate their ToS, which seems to directly contradict this (how can they delete things without write access, how can they know it violates the ToS without read access?). The answer about whether they complied with EU data protection laws was a very round-about way of saying 'no'.
What did I not see on that page:
It always amazes me when people read a puff-piece full of buzzwords and devoid of any content, yet come away completely reassured.
Non-unique. (Score:4, Interesting)
All of the issues they're clamoring over are completely non-unique. The simple fact that Google is giving Yale their Google Mail service for free is an advantage that cannot be glossed over in one sentence (as these authors did) for the following reasons:
This doesn't include the fact that no system, regardless of how well it's put together, is immune to the occassional outage. One can argue that administrators don't have much control over fixing an outage on Google's turf, but they have shown consistently that they can get everything back in working order extremely quickly. Plus, being able to manage millions of accounts (which include calendaring and contact storage for almost every account) while retaining extremely reliable levels of uptime is impressive.
I think the only reason why large-scale corporations haven't considered doing the same is to retain compliance. (Legal would never allow it).
Re:Gmail also occasionally goes down (Score:5, Interesting)
It's called outsourcing, contractors and management.
I work at a University that has recently outsourced their student e-mail to GMail. The University IT group has really bad management. There is a CIO, 3 Vice Presidents and 5 directors for an IT group roughly 300 people with 70% of them being contractors. Each group within the IT group (Exchange, Unix, NT, Mail, Helpdesk, Networking...) has their own 1 or 2 managers.
Of course when it's time to look for a solution, the contractors love to propose their 'appliances' and 'do-it-all software' with 'vendors' and 'partners' because their contracting companies are being sponsored by those companies. That's why we have Exchange with Quest Extensions ($25000/server for a piece of software that only SHOWS the flow of e-mail on a pretty screen), NetApp storage at $5/GB/year, PeopleSoft, Microsoft SMS/WSUS with Quest Extensions (so you can attempt to use WSUS on a Mac bound to Active Directory and Novell Linux bound to Active Directory - Solaris and Debian what's that), some random companies DHCP server appliances - $2500 for a piece of hardware that only does DHCP based on the open source dhcpd, a paid version of SysLog (the actual open source syslog-ng software) with licensing based on logs per hour.
Management thinks that this is normal and the way to do business. Of course their overhead is so large that hardly anybody uses their services as it is cheaper to get your own sysadmin and invest in hardware. So University IT supports about 20 of the smallest departments - those that are too small to pay for a single sysadmin, they need about 200 people to do that job (the other 100 are in networking, server admins and telephone)
Re:Monopoly (Score:2, Interesting)
1) GMail. 2) n.a.
3) Chose another university.
Seriously. The university chose the food management company, the cleaning contractors, and the security guard service. They also chose the e-mail contractors.
Like the undergrads care about e-mail privacy while they're simultaneously posting their frat party pictures to FB.
should have complained to dean of your college (Score:4, Interesting)
If the schools email system failed to properly send your class assignments and you didnt receive emails properly,
you should have contacted the university and appealed your grade. At the very least the university would have
allowed you to retake the class without cost or GPA penalty. You couldnt have been the only person in school this happened to.
You may still be able to appeal if nothing else to just get the F removed from your transcript(I assume to retook the course).
If you kept your emails since then you can print out your email directory where the old emails are missing.
google apps (Score:1, Interesting)
reliable e-mail (Score:1, Interesting)
Reliable e-mail is not that hard, especially if you don't have to deal with "enterprise" software.
Running a IMAP/webmail interface for students and grads is not that difficult, nor that expensive, nor that energy intensive. Dovecote, sendmail/postfix, and Squirrelmail/Roundcube run without problems on any decent POSIX system (Linux, BSD, Solaris). Attend a LISA conference or two, or go back into the archives, and you'll find plenty of examples of people running mail for thousands of users on a few moderately-sized machines.
Don't paint mail as "hard" just because people can't run Exchange properly.
Re:Why not? (Score:2, Interesting)
I might also mention that while you are a student (at least with Gmail), is that there are NO ADS.
When you graduate you can keep your existing e-mail and the ads will resume.
easy solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Google service is not available at all countries (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: email security (Score:3, Interesting)
You can know quite a bit, if you take the time to look.
You can find out how many servers your outbound mail always goes through by sending a message to yourself at an external email address and looking at the headers.
You can find out whether the recipient organisation handles its own email by looking up the MX records and then checking the IPs for each server to see whose address space they're in.
You can find out whether your correspondent is using SMTPS or STARTTLS, and whether there's an unbroken encrypted chain, by looking at the headers of messages you receive from him or her.
About the only thing you can't always find out on your own is whether he/she is using SSL for IMAP. Though if you're familiar with the institution, you could always ask. Or if it's a large organisation with a public web page for mail configuration details, you could try yourself and see if unencrypted IMAP/POP sessions are entertained, and the same for their webmail. If not, then you can probably rest assured on that score too.
They should ask SUNY Buffalo for tips (Score:3, Interesting)
We're going a different route... (Score:1, Interesting)
(Disclaimer: I work for a large US University, and I work on the team that provides student email, so I think I can speak with authority on this issue)
In the early 90's, students couldn't really have been expected to have an email address, so departments like CS and Math departments set up their own email servers for communication with students and with faculty in other universities. Registrars and student affairs departments wanted other ways to communicate with students, so they created centralized email systems for students. These days, schools are realizing that instead of providing a service to students that they want to use, the "official" school email system goes largely unused by a large population of the students, and a great number of students forward their email to their personal Gmail, Live, or Yahoo accounts, or they only check it at the beginning and end of the semester.
2 years ago, we were one of the first large Universities to outsource our email to Google Apps for Education. We in IT loved it, since it saved us a ton of money that we were going to have to spend to upgrade the student email system from the archaic, home-grown patchwork that was the old system. A lot of students liked it as well, but again, a lot of them forwarded their email to their personal accounts or just don't check it. Surveys of our students overwhelmingly show that students would prefer to just us their "regular" email accounts instead of forwarding, and another survey showed that a significant portion of the professors simply pass around a sheet for student to write their personal email addresses on anyway, or use our Blackboard online course management software to send messages to the class.
In this day and age, it is a pretty safe bet that incoming freshman already have an email account that they use frequently, running an email system is expensive and unpopular with students, and outsourcing has headaches that aren't apparent from the outset (or the outside looking in). We are starting a project to simply allow students to choose their personal email address as their "official" email account and slowly phase out Google Apps (nothing against Google Apps, it's a great service and we love you guys!).
Our CIO put it this way: I already have a joe.smith4324@gooyalivemail.com email address, I don't have a joe.smith@mybank.com email or a joe.smith@theelectricco.com or a joe.smith@myinsurancecompany.com, so why do I need a joe.smith23@my.school.edu???