Cross-posted to http://www.educause.edu/blog/borwick/SummaryOutsourcingEMailandOthe/173071.
Kyle Johnson from Guilford College and Charles Slack from Norfolk State University gave this presentation on "Outsourcing Email and Other Applications."
Both schools had provided 100 mb of quota to students and 1 gb of quota to faculty and staff. Both schools had a requirement to archive all sent and received email for legal reasons.
Norfolk State University has chosen Microsoft for its email solution, but has not begun implementation. Guilford College chose Google and is around 33% complete with its implementation.
Key takeaways:
- Consult General Counsel early
- People care a lot about their email; treat email-related changes carefully
- People can use email in unusual ways e.g. return receipts; understand business uses
- Email accounts are closely tied to identity management issues e.g. when should an account be provisioned and deprovisioned
- Set up a mechanism for people to migrate themselves e.g. by going to a web form and saying "Yes, I'm ready to go to Google mail"
Google-specific things:
- Google mail has optional postini support for archiving emails
- Google's "Global Directory" option has potential FERPA implications for students who request for their information to be blocked
- Google will provide email to alumni but alumni must be shown advertisements
- Google does not support renaming email accounts; perhaps accounts could be unique identifiers e.g. 123456 with email aliases for the email address.
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