As promised in one of my latest posts, blogging has been very light lately. Don’t worry, I’ll be back in full mode soon.
In the meantime, you might want to have a look at a feature-long article I wrote for the August issue of University Business about email outsourcing: E-mail, Gmail, Hotmail, and Beyond.
And, if your institution went that road, I’d like to hear from you about the whole “email outsourcing” experience.
Do you think this is as good as it sounds in my UB article?
Tell us by posting a comment!
I’ve been talking about outsourcing with our new CIO, so your article is quite timely. I’m going to share it with her. Thanks!
I’m the CTO at a small college in North Carolina. We’re in the process of moving everyone (students, faculty, and staff) from Lotus Notes to Google Apps. We looked at the Lotus Notes 8 upgrade and realized it would require more server and staff resources than we have, so we decided to outsource all our email. We evaluated both Google Apps and Live@EDU, and were much happier with the offerings from Google (Microsoft charges for faculty and staff email, Google doesn’t). We’re adding some of the Postini products to archive email for faculty and staff, and that seemed to be enough for our legal counsel to get on board.
There was an email passing around yesterday from the VP of IT mentioning serious consideration of outsourcing email to Gmail. I think it could be a great thing…
Two years ago when I mentioned the idea I was basically laughed at, isn’t it ironic how things come around?
Who knows what the situation will be in 5 years with universities who took today’s plunge to outsource email. Will google end up like so many other megacorps and make it difficult for customers to turn to other solutions? Who knows. I’m for google apps though. Campus IT resources will ALWAYS be playing catchup on email. The two biggest issues being storage limits and spam blocking.
And freeing up the man-hours and equipment costs required to keep up with email demands, like your article mentions, is a big deal. It ends up meaning more resources to work on other infrastructure IT projects and application development. It’s a win-win. A no brainer.
I’ve posted a few thoughts as a follow up to your great article over at my blog here: http://highedwebtech.com/2008/08/07/a-quick-thought-or-two-about-email-outsourcing/