The FASTForward Blog » The end of University Email: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary

The end of University Email

by Rob Paterson

April 12, 2010 at 2:46 pm · Filed under Google

One of the most bizarre aspects of university life is that campuses, full of the most media savvy people n the planet, run a tighter ship than the US military when it comes to the internet.

Well as the financial side of life has got tougher, the appeal of Gmail is growing more appealing every day.

As colleges and universities across the nation look for ways to cut costs, a number of schools are trading in-house e-mail systems for Gmail.Google provides schools with more disc space and a special Apps for Education package at a very competitive price: free.

Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., promises its students a Wesleyan e-mail account for life. So when the university outsourced its e-mail to Google in late 2008, Karen Warren, director of user and technical services at Wesleyan, says the university wanted to make good on that promise.

“We committed to making all the functionality that they had from their old system, plus more. And the big ‘plus more’ was space. We were running out of space,” she says.

Even before the switch, more than half the student body was using Gmail to bypass the Wesleyan e-mail interface, she says.

“Clunky would be a charitable description of how the e-mail used to work, and the thing that I’ve most noticed after the switch over to Google is that things have become a lot more streamlined and things have become a lot more centralized,” says Nicholas Marshall, a senior at Wesleyan.

A Money Saver For Schools

Universities have to maintain large amounts of server space to house data, like student e-mail. But as students send bigger and bigger files, like videos and pictures, on-site storage gets costly. It makes Gmail an attractive — and cheap — alternative.

The wedge is in!

Share and Enjoy:

Permalink

9 Tweets

13 Comments »

Harold JarcheApril 12th, 2010 at 3:01 pm

Soon basic IT services will be like electricity. Few organizations have a “Chief Electricity Officer” and so shall this period of the IT Priesthood pass into history.

Rob PatersonApril 12th, 2010 at 3:07 pm

H I would not even say RIP more RIHell

Joe McKendrickApril 12th, 2010 at 4:06 pm

Rob: Spot on. I use Temple University email (my alma mater), and they switched to branded Gmail about a year ago. It works very nicely, has a ton of storage space, and now the university doesn’t have to spend resources maintaining it — maybe even help keep tuition from going up too much!

-Joe

Jim McGeeApril 14th, 2010 at 8:14 am

I’ve spoken with a few University IT leaders about this recently. Student email via Google mail is very attractive. On the other hand, staff/faculty email is a bit trickier. Research universities, for example. have a good bit of compliance risk with sponsored research and frequently receive subpoenas for records and emails during various investigations. In at least one case I am familiar with, this issue led to the university sticking with internal email, even though it was more expensive. They felt that the security and risk management issues with gmail hadn’t been resolved enough to make the lawyers happy