Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: Discontinuing student email service
From: Eric Case <ecase () EMAIL ARIZONA EDU>
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:11:25 -0700
True the implementation is not free but is less than 1% of the savings. Arizona State University saves "almost $500,000/year, about $400,00/year" <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x2fJRW_vvQ> over $353,000/year <http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/customers/pdfs/asu_success_story.p df> $500,000/year <http://www.amazon.com/Google-Apps-Deciphered-Compute-Streamline/dp/product- description/0137004702> "Michigan district saves $400,000/year with Google Apps Education Edition" <http://www.districtadministration.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=2291>. If the rest of the equation is the same, you still save more than disk space. You get the rest of the suite, which brings more value than just email. Perhaps adding potential you could not afford to offer. One reason to keep faculty and staff in house is to not pay for archiving, etc. Some institutions have move all users to the cloud and not paid for archiving, etc. because of their policies. I would suggest everyone on the list subscribe to the EDUCAUSE CIO list <http://www.educause.edu/CIOConstituentGroup/965>, if for no other reason than to know what your CIO is seeing in the "big picture." This and similar topics are discussed at the 30,000-foot level. One of today topics was "'Local list serve or hosted?' You moved your email to the cloud. What about your list servs?" If you want to know more about Policy and Law, subscribe to the ICPL list <http://www.educause.edu/PolicyAndLawConstituentGroup/976>. On the other hand, you can delete this email, put your head in the sand and complain that "they" do not get it. -Eric Eric Case, CISSP eric (at) ericcase (dot) com http://www.linkedin.com/in/ericcase
-----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Jesse Thompson Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 11:39 AM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Discontinuing student email service Google Apps is *not* free to implement. You still need to provide support, administer the service offering, provision the users, maintain email delivery and spam control (in common configurations), deal with a non-responsive vendor, rename/delete/migrate/merge accounts, migrate email between services, deal with e-discovery, you *still* have to deal with compromised accounts, etc. Basically, you have to do everything you did before, plus some additional stuff, but you have a less useful administrative toolset. About the only thing you save is disk space. But students don't use nearly as much disk space as fac/staff, and disk gets cheaper over time. To the schools that have decided to outsource only non-fac/staff email (something like half of our students are also fac/staff.) I would ask: why are you maintaining 2 email services? Now you have to deal with the difficulties with providing a collaborative environment between users on disparate email services. I contend that this isn't saving any money, and it is probably costing more money overall. So, back to the original question "Why do we still provide student email accounts?". Well, we need students to have email accounts so that they can communicate and collaborate with fac/staff. I contend that the best way to do this is to have both user populations using the same email service. If that means that fac/staff are also on Google, then that's OK; it's still just one email service. So, if you don't care about keeping students on the same system as fac/staff, do you need to *provide* the accounts - either locally or on Google? No. I think that it is possible to just ask the students for their email addresses (it works for Facebook and other web communities.) The problem with this model is that it is hard to deliver mail to the big free-mail providers because they reject, rate limit, bitbucket and filter your mail. This problem isn't easy to work around, but it's possible, and it is cheaper than hosting students locally or on Google. Another idea that I have been pitching on our campus is the idea of creating a "secure messaging" system (akin to a bank, or an HMO, or even Facebook) within our portal. Ideally, the only email that students would ever receive would be notifications that they have messages waiting for them in the portal. If they don't get the messages, then they will eventually log in to the portal to find the messages anyway. In reality, this would still be an email service, but it would be used strictly for the purpose of official communication, so it should be easier to justify. I neglected to mention alumni accounts. I can see how cost control can be a problem for schools that offer free alumni email accounts. In that case, it doesn't make sense to locally host alumni accounts (unless you're just forwarding.) But, it probably doesn't make sense to offer alumni email at all IMO. We're unique, since we deactivate student accounts and our alumni association offers their own service. Jesse On 1/26/2010 8:59 AM, Charles Seitz wrote:If the question comes to one of cost, as an educational institutionyou areeligible to get aboard with Google Apps free of charge. TheUniversity ofTennessee system is going this way a campus at a time quitesuccessfully andis offloading all of the student email from the Exchange system. The students will have their email address for life, the Universitydoesn't haveto maintain anything for them, and the University now has a point ofcontactwith alumni for the rest of their lives. It's a win for everyone. Charles A. Seitz Senior Security Analyst University of Tennessee Information Security Office Martin Campus cseitz () tennessee edu (731) 881-7966 Mobile (615) 948-3641 On 1/26/10 8:52 AM, "Matthew Gracie"<graciem () CANISIUS EDU> wrote:Hall, Rand wrote:On the heels of another student email outsourcing question...it has occurred to me that some of us may want to step back and reflect on the following question: Why do we still provide student email accounts? We once provided labs full of typewriters and then computers. Weusedto provide our own dialup service. Once these things were commoditized we were able to largely eliminate them. Do studentaccounts fall into the same lifecycle pattern?I can't speak for anyone else, but here at Canisius, the college-provided email address is an official point of contact for departments like the library, the registrar's office, and thebursar'soffice. It's used in our CMS, our class-specific email lists, and a dozen other places. Getting rid of it would mean either lots more postal mail or comingupwith some backend database of student's voluntarily provided homeaddresses. I shudder at the thought of maintaining that mess. --Matt-- Jesse Thompson Division of Information Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison Email/IM: jesse.thompson () doit wisc edu
Current thread:
- Re: Discontinuing student email service, (continued)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Terence Ma (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Michael J. Wheeler (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Moore, Frank (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Bob Bayn (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Jesse Thompson (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Julian Y. Koh (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Michael J. Wheeler (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Moore, Frank (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Jesse Thompson (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Jesse Thompson (Jan 26)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Eric Case (Jan 27)
- Re: Discontinuing student email service Stephen John Smoogen (Jan 27)