>There is an interesting article in "The Chronicle of Higher Education",
>Jan. 11, 2008, headlined "Colleges Get Out of E-Mail Business" (sorry
>it's not a free link). It says more than 1000 colleges have signed up
>with either Google Apps Education Edition or Microsoft Live@edu and
>turned over their entire email operations to these companies for free.
>In many cases, this was prompted by student requests who saw these
>services as more convenient, more spacious (5 gigabytes of server space
>per person), and did I mention FREE? Colleges that use these services
>may continue to use their institutional names including the ".edu."
>Online calendars and collaborative work spaces allow students to
>collaborate and coordinate.
>
>Have any of you considered doing or already done this?
I've had my eye on Google Apps for literally years. I've long felt school IT
departments are too small to be in the email/calendaring business where
economies of scale are so important. I myself have been using Google Apps
gmail and calendar for over 9 months and have not missed Lotus Notes for a
minute. I'm currently running a pilot with several dozen students and
faculty and will make a decision in March whether to make the move or not.
There is certainly some loss of control, but most of the negatives I've
heard about or encountered have reasonable workarounds. For example, for
those who need to log email you can either pay for or host a logging SMTP
server and relay all mail to/from Google Apps through the server. While we
don't log, we use an anti-spam server (MX Logic) which we really like which
does just this. All inbound mail first goes to MX Logic and then is relayed
on to our mail servers.
The biggest single negative I've encountered is the lack of sharable address
books. For example, many administrative office use shared address books, but
there is no easy way to do this in Google Apps.
Below is a KB page I wrote for those who expressed an interest in
participating in our Google Apps pilot which contains some useful
information including pluses and minuses.
http://falconnet.peddie.org/kb/article.aspx?id=10083
--
Tom Phelan
Director of Technology
Peddie School
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