selling advertising, not applications. You agree to their Terms of Service
in order to get their 'free' products. Those terms include their right to
scan your emails for subjects of interest to you. They also (reportedly)
scan emails SENT TO YOU by people who didn't agree to their terms of
service.
My school has a number of other needs competing for resources. So a free,
globally-accessible email solution with a pleasant interface and some nice
features feels very tempting. Here, some of my staff are so unhappy with
our current POP3 > Outlook (not Exchange) that they have taken to using
their personal Gmail accounts "on behalf of" their official school accounts.
However I have a real concern about the privacy of sensitive matters which
regularly pass through teachers' and administrators' inboxes.
How have you who use GoogleApps managed the privacy issue? I realize that
NO EMAILS sent via the internet are truly confidential but...
Dan Berger
Technology Coordinator
Jewish Primary Day School of the Nations Capital
-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for independent school educators
[mailto:ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU] On Behalf Of CHRISTOPHER BUTLER
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 4:18 PM
To: ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Subject: Re: Looking for Browser Based Hosted Email Solution (UNCLASSIFIED)
I hope someone has a good response to what I'm about to write. I don't mean
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:
> 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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