Re: Discontinuing student email service

[Charles Seitz <cseitz () UTM EDU>]

If the question comes to one of cost, as an educational institution you are
eligible to get aboard with Google Apps free of charge. The University of
Tennessee system is going this way a campus at a time quite successfully and
is offloading all of the student email from the Exchange system. The
students will have their email address for life, the University doesn't have
to maintain anything for them, and the University now has a point of contact
with alumni for the rest of their lives. It's a win for everyone.

Charles A. Seitz
Senior Security Analyst
University of Tennessee Information Security Office
Martin Campus
cseitz () tennessee edu
(731) 881-7966
Mobile (615) 948-3641



On 1/26/10 8:52 AM, "Matthew Gracie" <graciem () CANISIUS EDU> wrote:

> Hall, Rand wrote:
> > On the heels of another student email outsourcing question...it has
> > occurred to me that some of us may want to step back and reflect on
> > the following question:
> >
> > Why do we still provide student email accounts?
> >
> > We once provided labs full of typewriters and then computers. We used
> > to provide our own dialup service. Once these things were
> > commoditized we were able to largely eliminate them. Do student email
> > accounts fall into the same lifecycle pattern?
>
> I can't speak for anyone else, but here at Canisius, the
> college-provided email address is an official point of contact for
> departments like the library, the registrar's office, and the bursar's
> office. It's used in our CMS, our class-specific email lists, and a
> dozen other places.
>
> Getting rid of it would mean either lots more postal mail or coming up
> with some backend database of student's voluntarily provided home email
> addresses. I shudder at the thought of maintaining that mess.
>
> --Matt