the idea, at the moment enough people have concerns about it that we're not
doing it.
The concerns are the standard ones about control and privacy, and yet, when
I think of the number of students and faculty who routinely either POP their
mail to another client or have it autoforwarded (or auto-captured) by
another service, both of those go out the window.
If by "control" you're talking about the ability to freeze a student's email
account for digital misbehavior, that went down the tubes the minute Hotmail
was born.
AsI see it, email is like the phone system. In the beginning, it may have
been worthwhile for us all to run our own little PBXs in order to get out to
the rest of the world, but the time eventually comes when you realize that
Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, or whoever your local provider is, could do a much
better job and you could free up resources for solving other problems - or
even hiring a new faculty person.
I thought that in-house email was a bad idea for a small school from the
very beginning. When I was the only person doing most of the networking
stuff in a department that was first part of Math and then merged with the
Library, I saw having our own domain, in-house system and server as
something that would be great for bragging rights, but ultimately a huge
resource drain. Better, I thought, that there should be some way for us to
team up with a much larger entity, like a local college, or a *group* of
schools to do this.
Later on, as I discovered web-hosting systems, and was the person behind
getting my church a presence on one that included email addresses, I thought
again about how much better it would be for us to have our email at least
hosted and maintained by a third party that did this "for real." The
provider my church is hooked up with has continually upped the space and
number of email addresses we get, while keeping the same price for the past
eight or so years. Now we're up to the capability of 400 email addresses and
a "whopping" 500mb of disk space for $10/month. But still, if we could get
people to POP their email to a local client, I figured that might be doable.
And even though a third party was hosting it, we'd still have the ability to
administer the accounts, adding, deleting, and freezing people as needed.
But still, that 500mb limit for *all* the accounts was an insurmountable
barrier.
So then, when I discovered Google Apps for Education, I loved the idea. The
Gmail interface, which most of them are familiar with, is a whole lot better
than that of OWA (which is severely wanting in many areas). Their disk
allotment was so much more *per person* than we were able to provide them.
And in fact, I had been teaching many students how to have Gmail grab their
mail off of our server anyway (and then have it label itself as coming from
us). True, we would lose some "control* (as we do by getting phone services
from Verizon), but we'd also gain some freedom.
Of course there will be times when the system goes down and there's nothing
you can do about it while you wait for them to fix it. But at least in that
case you know that they've got a staff of extremely well-trained and
well-paid people working on it, rather than the one IT person who also
doubles as the soccer coach, who won't be any good to anyone in school the
next day, *if* she's figured out the problem by then. In other words, having
the system in-house and run by your own people is no guarantee that it won't
go down, or that they'll be able to get it fixed immediately.
I'm looking forward to more schools successfully joining the Google Apps
bandwagon so that the rest of us lose our fear of giving up control.
--
keg
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Keith E Gatling - Computer Instructor
Manlius Pebble Hill School
5300 Jamesville Rd
DeWitt, NY 13214
315.446.2452
http://www.gatling.us/keith
Some teachers teach subjects. Others teach students.
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