Re: Discontinuing student email service

[Jesse Thompson <jesse.thompson () DOIT WISC EDU>]

Google Apps is *not* free to implement.  You still need to provide 
support, administer the service offering, provision the users, maintain 
email delivery and spam control (in common configurations), deal with a 
non-responsive vendor, rename/delete/migrate/merge accounts, migrate 
email between services, deal with e-discovery, you *still* have to deal 
with compromised accounts, etc.

Basically, you have to do everything you did before, plus some 
additional stuff, but you have a less useful administrative toolset.

About the only thing you save is disk space.  But students don't use 
nearly as much disk space as fac/staff, and disk gets cheaper over time.

To the schools that have decided to outsource only non-fac/staff email 
(something like half of our students are also fac/staff.)  I would ask: 
why are you maintaining 2 email services?  Now you have to deal with the 
difficulties with providing a collaborative environment between users on 
disparate email services.  I contend that this isn't saving any money, 
and it is probably costing more money overall.

So, back to the original question "Why do we still provide student email 
accounts?".  Well, we need students to have email accounts so that they 
can communicate and collaborate with fac/staff.  I contend that the best 
way to do this is to have both user populations using the same email 
service.  If that means that fac/staff are also on Google, then that's 
OK; it's still just one email service.

So, if you don't care about keeping students on the same system as 
fac/staff, do you need to *provide* the accounts - either locally or on 
Google?  No.  I think that it is possible to just ask the students for 
their email addresses (it works for Facebook and other web communities.) 
 The problem with this model is that it is hard to deliver mail to the 
big free-mail providers because they reject, rate limit, bitbucket and 
filter your mail.  This problem isn't easy to work around, but it's 
possible, and it is cheaper than hosting students locally or on Google.

Another idea that I have been pitching on our campus is the idea of 
creating a "secure messaging" system (akin to a bank, or an HMO, or even 
Facebook) within our portal.  Ideally, the only email that students 
would ever receive would be notifications that they have messages 
waiting for them in the portal.  If they don't get the messages, then 
they will eventually log in to the portal to find the messages anyway. 
In reality, this would still be an email service, but it would be used 
strictly for the purpose of official communication, so it should be 
easier to justify.

I neglected to mention alumni accounts.  I can see how cost control can 
be a problem for schools that offer free alumni email accounts.  In that 
case, it doesn't make sense to locally host alumni accounts (unless 
you're just forwarding.)  But, it probably doesn't make sense to offer 
alumni email at all IMO.  We're unique, since we deactivate student 
accounts and our alumni association offers their own service.

Jesse

On 1/26/2010 8:59 AM, Charles Seitz wrote:
> 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

--
  Jesse Thompson
  Division of Information Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Email/IM: jesse.thompson () doit wisc edu

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