to rain on the parade of praise for off-site email, but I do have some
concerns with not having more control over the server.
What happens when a student's account gets abused by another student who has
stolen a password? Assuming that you can even get access to the logs that
track logins, read messages, etc..., if it happened during the school day
(or if you are a boarding school) the best info you will get is your public
WAN address. You'll have a bear of a time tracking those logins back to
particular machines on campus.
We've had this happen a few times here and within 15 minutes, I can
associate an email login to a computer on campus by IP and cross-reference
that with workstation logins and pretty quickly get a very short list of
students who were probably involved. No need to wait for Google to provide
the info (assuming they will even do that). In some cases, we've even
tracked the suspect logins to public IPs and have been able to cross
reference those with other logins from that IP and challenge the students to
a decent explanation of what our logs show.
We also have access to detailed message tracking for both internal and SMTP
messaging so that we can usually get the information we need pretty quickly
to solve problems.
I would be happy to save money go with an offsite solution, but I'd also
want to continue to have detailed tracking and reporting for tracking down
inappropriate use and troubleshooting. Do any of the off-site vendors off
this?
Christopher Butler
--
Christopher Butler
Academic Technology Director
St. John's Preparatory School
Danvers, MA
On 4/9/08 3:42 PM, "Tom Phelan" <tphelan@PEDDIE.ORG> wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Apr 2008 10:33:24 -0400, Johnson, Jason P Mr WRAMC_Wash DC
> <Jason.Johnson3@amedd.army.mil> wrote:
>
>> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
>> Caveats: NONE
>>
>> I wondered if anyone has a good web browser-based, hosted email
>> recommendation with the following caveats:
>> --My initial recommendation was Google's education solution but it is
>> currently out of the running due to negative experiences with the gmail
>> service when administrators used it for personal email.
>> --We have a host that can provide web based access to mail using
>> Squirrel mail but no one likes the overall interface.
>> --We are not considering a hosted Microsoft Exchange solution at this
>> time, mostly due to its comparatively high cost and the differences in
>> functionality when used on different platforms.
>>
>
>
> IMHO Google Apps is THE solution for those looking for a web-based email
> solution. We have been looking at Google Apps since Fall 2006, are currently
> running a pilot with about 40 users, and will be switching over the summer.
>
> With all due respect to your administrators, I hardly think their personal
> experiences with Gmail should be anything beyond one factor among many.
> Perhaps you administrators might like the price...free! Furthermore, no
> matter what you switch to some will like it and some won't. It doesn't make
> sense for the personal preference of a few to outweigh all other
> considerations.
>
> Don't forget Google Calendar, Google Start, Google Docs, and Google Sites.
> While you probably won't be jumping into these on day one, all of them show
> a lot of promise for education use. Also, Google Apps is very well
> positioned as ubiquitous broadband becomes a reality and more and more users
> have Internet connected phones/mobile devices.
>
> Sorry I didn't have time for more specifics...
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