Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Education IT

Colleges Outsourcing Email To MS Live, Google 256

Posted by kdawson from the who-uses-email-anyway dept.
Andy Guess tips us to his article at Inside Higher Ed offering a detailed look at the snowballing trend of colleges outsourcing their email infrastructure, mostly to Google and Microsoft Live. Even outsourcing just email would presage big changes in the work that IT departments do on campus; but more such changes are on the horizon as schools grapple with entering freshmens' already entrenched online habits.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Colleges Outsourcing Email To MS Live, Google More

Colleges Outsourcing Email To MS Live, Google

Comments Filter:

  • Outsourcing it? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @06:48PM (#21499055)
    If I was a university president, my motto would be "Get a gmail account, bitches", then I'd be all like, "Regeants: Up my pay another $150K", then under my breath I'd be like, "bitches."

  • This might not be good.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by webmaster404 ( 1148909 ) on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @06:49PM (#21499073)
    This might not be good for campuses that may experience network outages. With servers on campus, at least messages could be sent via the network rather then the internet, but now, if the internet is down, Live or Google goes down (possible for Live far-fetched though for Google) or MS (or possibly Google) decides to charge for a "premium" account that takes away features from the "free" counterpart. And also, if MS's or Google's web-mail system gets exposed to security venerabilities, it could be just as insecure as Outlook or IE.

    • Re:This might not be good.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by lymond01 ( 314120 ) on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @06:57PM (#21499169)
      Working for a university, I'd say that our Internet connection goes down less often than our infrastructure goes down, even though that's usually local to an area or building on campus (temporary bridge loop, etc). And even if the University connection to the Internet is down, students can still go off-campus to get email (coffee shop, etc). The "Internet", or a pipe towards some Gmail server somewhere, being completely down is a rare occasion.

      Privacy is our biggest issue with the Gmail for students pilot program. No ads, sure, but mail is still being bot-scanned and some of it is sensitive information which, by policy, is not to be allowed off the campus infrastructure. Those are the hurdles we're working around with Google.

      • Privacy is our biggest issue with the Gmail for students pilot program. No ads, sure, but mail is still being bot-scanned and some of it is sensitive information which, by policy, is not to be allowed off the campus infrastructure. Those are the hurdles we're working around with Google.

        Knowing the number of universities that have had rather high-profile data losses and hacks (and also knowing several of the Uni's IT staff) I'd be much more comfortable with Google reading my mail than my school's IT departme

    • Normally when there is an outage it is because their servers are down... In college back in them old 90's whenever I occurred a network outage (and they were a lot) 99% of the time it was because they had a problem with a server, hub (switches were still too expensive back then), or the router (which they called a firewall although it never blocked a single port, but it is the same IT Guy who got mad when we put an 10/100 Mb switch saying that 100 Mbs packets are interfering with the 10 Mbs network) which

    • Re:This might not be good.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by superflit ( 1193931 ) on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @07:19PM (#21499359) Homepage
      I give all my thumbs Up for this.
      Already done 4000 user accounts, and now doing more 44000 for all users.
      Google Rocks.
      About the network Connection, we have 3 data links (one radio, 2 fibre). The downtime by year is very little.
      Only students will have a Google Account, all the teachers and administrative will continue using in-house solutions.
      (we have to take more control, backups, logs, etc..)
      We did a small survey and 80% of all users choose Highly satisfied using Google.

      Microsoft is another history, you have to pay for License to have a in-house server syncing with your AD (SQL Server + MIIS)..
      And if you do not want ads, have to pay (Google Education is free and you can take out the ads..)

      About APIs: Google has the single-sign , easy, open, and I can choose (Java,Python,Net,etc.)
      And now google has made avaliable APIs to migration and Reports, they keep evolving the product..
      security: How many Security Bugs Google Apps had VS others MTAs??

      I will ask them for a job or a commission there..

  • Not so strange (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @06:49PM (#21499075)
    Most of the academics I work with (professors, grad students, undergrads) already use either a regular gmail or yahoo account for their primary email address. Usually these services have better spam protection, higher storage limits, and better portability than a university email address.

    • Get off my lawn (Score:3, Interesting)

      by megaditto ( 982598 )
      Really? Long time ago, my university used to have a strict policy about electronic transmission of things like student grades or research data...

      So I wonder why these days any American Uni would want their intellecual property transmitted over google.cn routers?

      The whole country going down the tubes, looks like.
      • Well they really shouldn't put that kind of stuff in an email to begin with if that's their policy.

        Looking at the grand scheme, I can't imagine too many benefits to running your own exchange or notes, or whatever email system. There are some security benefits and a whole lot of security risks. Even at businesses with full IT staffs, it's a pain, there are issues with storage and email retention, there are issues with their damn filters as they attempt to fight spam and viruses, there are issues with

      • My School went over to Gmail not to long ago, and simultaneously banned sending grade information via e-mail...which means the only way to find out your grade is to go to the website (extremely slow, both when trying to get it running on your computer and at getting the data online) or asking the teacher (basic mail is either banned or extremely rare, as I've never gotten anything from them).

        So for us it's not worrying about our grades being sent over google's routers that's the problem, it's worrying about
        • When I went to university we mostly got the marks by going to the professors office and looking at the grades posted on their door. The only identifying information was student number, and this was pretty much the standard way of getting grades on exams and major tests. Assignments were given back by the TA during the lab/tutorial hours, by placing them on in nicely ordered piles at the front of the class and the students weeding through them in about 5 minutes. There was some professors who posted mark

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 1u3hr ( 530656 )
        I wonder why these days any American Uni would want their intellecual property transmitted over google.cn routers?

        I can't imagine how that could happen unless the recipient was actually in China. In which case, China controls the ISPs and you have no hope of privacy. Regardless, sending unencrypted email anywhere to anyone is just hoping that no one en route wants to snoop. Ten years ago I installed a PGP plugin to my email client. But I gave it up when I migrated to my next system, because absolutely no

    • Exactly right. Who doesn't already have an email address by the time they get to college?

      Mod parent up.

  • We have thought of this (Score:4, Informative)

    by Paul Pierce ( 739303 ) on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @06:54PM (#21499127) Homepage
    I've worked IT at a College for 5 years now. We actually had a push for MS live taking over our e-mail from some of our co-workers. It has always scared me, and much prefer keeping it in house. M$ was going to do everything for us for FREE. They would keep us up with the times, keep data secure, etc...

    My two main issues:
    1. If (when) M$ starts charging for this down the road, then what? They could charge virtually anything they wanted for us to get our e-mails back if we didn't like their new price.

    2. We do sometimes lose connection to the internet, internal e-mail will no longer work

    • Re:We have thought of this (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <.moc.eeznerif.todhsals. .ta. .treb.> on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @07:40PM (#21499553) Homepage
      When i was at college, hotmail and other free mail services (usa.net etc) were banned.

      Other things to consider:

      How much of your mail goes outside, and how much stays inside? We had a lot of internal traffic, often sometimes quite heavy (large attachments etc) and it would have been pointless sending this out over the wan only to have it come straight back in again...

      What is your privacy policy? And what kind of data is sent over email? If your sending students' personal details etc around you might not have their permission to send/store them off-campus on equipment not owned by the college.

      How much storage will users want/need? Disk space is cheap these days...

      Can you keep a local backup? You should demand this really, have some ability to pull incremental backups of the mail spools in a standard format so that you have a workable exit strategy if you want to switch services or move it back inhouse. You need to be able to do this centrally, not rely on each user to download all the mails to their clients - most wont.

      Is access to mail provided via the methods you need (imap, pop3 etc)?
  • Take a look at the weavers during the 18th century. As soon as power and roads allowed. That's approximately what's going to happen to internal IT organisations and independent software places.
     

  • gmail/school (Score:2, Informative)

    by u235meltdown ( 940099 )
    I have my university emails all forwarded to GMail already, but I have used our web-mail systems and have found that they are not half bad. It's just that GMail is even cleaner and aggregates all my messages and calendars for me. Some of my friends (after seeing what I did) followed suite, while others still preferred to keep school and everything else separate.

    • Re:gmail/school (Score:4, Informative)

      by betterunixthanunix ( 980855 ) on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @08:20PM (#21499869)
      Aggregating messages and calendars is nothing new, it was available in desktop email programs long before GMail was even on the map. I use Kontact, for example, which allows me to do things that google's web interface is not capable of (to the best of my knowledge):

      • Drag-n-drop emails into calendar or todo items, and visa-versa
      • Integrated e-mail encryption (almost all universities read students' emails)
      • Automatic reminders on my desktop of upcoming events or todo items (Google desktop may or may not support this, I haven't checked)
      • Logging of completed todo items (surprisingly useful)
      • Offline availability (wifi and cell coverage are not universal)

      And that is just what I personally use. Outlook, Evolution, and others have similar features. GMail's web interface is interesting, but you can only go so far with a web interface, and I really don't see the attraction of a web interface over a mature, integrated email program. My university made a big deal out of an upgrade to a new web interface for our email, and I just yawn seeing "new" features that I've been using since high school.

  • Gee, was it only ten years ago when UNL switched everyone, faculty and students, from normal e-mail to Lotus Notes? No, I think it had to be longer than that.

    At it seems they still are using it [unl.edu], at least 10 years later. (Even some of the old pages [unl.edu] still exist.) Most recent news: attachment size limit has been scaled back to 120 MB "to increase productivity and reliablity". If I hadn't linked it, you could have found it by searching for that misspelling (and two other hits for the phrase, sadly).

  • Surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by weave ( 48069 ) on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @07:25PM (#21499415) Journal

    Speaking as one of those alleged incompetent educational IT directors, I'm not seeing a lot of value in this. Email costs us next to nothing now. Let's see, I have 40,000 active accounts now on one server, using Cyrus, dspam, clam-av, and policyd. All the software is free so the cost is basically a new server every three years and some storage space on the SAN (email is a very small portion of space on the SAN so freeing it up won't buy us much).

    Yeah, if I had an Exchange farm and a dedicated staff to manage it, then outsourcing it would be enticing. As it is now, it'd be more work to figure out how to migrate people away from a tried-and-true solution as well as the privacy and FERPA issues than it is to let it ride as is, and if people do something stupid like delete a folder, we can easily restore it from backup in short order.

    In-house also means being able to use a single-sign on solution for all campus services. Same ID, sign in once using CAS (Central Auth Service -- another freebie package)

    (We do provide an interface for users to forward their emails to their preferred provider. No one is forcing them to use us.)

    Now what I would like to do is outsource shared calendaring service with seamless syncing to a plethora of mobile devices. That's a need that hasn't been adequately addressed in-house. ie, before fixing stuff that's not broken, how about helping with services that fix what *is* broken!

    btw, news flash, people under 20 don't use email much anyway. It's basically the tool of "old people." Email is busted in many ways and will probably die as a platform in the future anyway. I say let it ride as is until then.

    Now get off my lawn.

    • They pretty much all support syncml now and there are a couple of syncml servers available. Seems to work ok.

      Opensync, multisync and funambol. Funambol may be your best all in one bet.

       
    • Mod Parent up. God, someone that is prgamatic is refreshing around here...
    • I wish there were more sys admins like you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
      w, news flash, people under 20 don't use email much anyway. It's basically the tool of "old people.

      you're an IT director in Korea?

    • Re:Surprising... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @09:23PM (#21500343)
      As someone in a rather similar position at a small college I do see a substantial saving in time and money in these services, but I also see a lot of caveats that need to be considered. Oh, and for the record we are an all M$ shop:

      Benefit 1. Federal and State Compliance. The equation is this: if we don't house the email, we don't have to deal with the legal issues of keeping it. Patriot Act archiving requirements, the implications of hacks, etc. all become someone else's problem.

      Caveat 1: I would never outsource faculty or staff accounts, because of FERPA (Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act) requirements. Frankly I am not sure if I could even legally do this, because I can't ensure that the hosting service will honor the very strict requirement of the act. This means that even if we were to put this together we would still run Exchange in-house, for the few hundred accounts that remain.

      Benefit 2: Academic Freedom. Is a student's email cannot be accessed by the college, then they cannot accuse us of infringing on their academic freedom. This is very important to some people, to the extent that they avoid sending certain kinds of emails through the campus system. In a lot of schools around the country, students have strange ideas that we monitor everything that they say. We don't (although I can't vouch for other schools) but you just can't tell someone this.

      Caveat 2: Just because we don't do it, doesn't mean that it can't be done by the host. See Benefit/Caveat 1.

      Benefit 3: Spam filtering. I don't care how much you like your spam filter, Gmail and Hotmail will probably beat it. Why? They have hundreds of billions of test cases to work their software on.

      Caveat 3: Some users like a fine grained control over their spam filters, and the approach that these vendors use may not be to everyones liking. This is especially true of anyone who has ever lost an important message because of a false positive.
  • I am currently in my senior year at a small college. When I started, we had a web-based email system that barely worked, set up by an IT staff that had all been fired, and the new IT staff didn't have time to use it. So everyone forwarded college email to another account and ignored the campus email system. By the time the IT staff was able to get a new system running, nobody cared. For a while the school disable forwarding to get students to use the system, but that just resulted in students and faculty ig
    • set up by an IT staff that had all been fired

      Your problem is not IT staff, it's clueless administration. It's too bad they can't outsource that.

  • I am very alarmed by this development (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cos(x) ( 677938 ) on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @07:34PM (#21499499)
    My university is in the process of switching to GMail. The old home-grown system was abysmal at best, but I was simply forwarding all e-mails to my private address and never worried about it. With that system about to be shut down next week, I set up the GMail account I am forced to get today - and I find it really troubling that I had to do so. All I want is to forward my e-mail to my private address again. I have absolutely no interest in Google's services, in their Spam filtering or nifty webmail interface. GMail does offer forwarding. I enabled it and expect never to never in my life visit GMail's site again. But before getting this far, I had to accept Google's terms of service and privacy policy.

    I am forced to use the college e-mail address for some administrative stuff. How is it reasonable that this also forces me to accept some third party's terms and rules? If I *wanted* GMail's services, then it is fair game that I would have to accept their terms. But if all I want to do is forward my e-mails and get them off the service as fast as possible, there should be a shortcut way that routes the e-mails around Google's servers, prohibiting Google from having a peek inside. College has picked a third party here and is forcing me to enter into a contract with them. This isn't right.

  • think the kids have problems now (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @07:39PM (#21499547) Homepage Journal
    We talk about the kids facebook profile as a liability when they try to find jobs...

    What about a record of every email they sent in college. Every threat to a competing lover, every breakup, every plan to falsify grades.

    The nice thing about email on a schools server is that the mail is presumably gone when the student leaves college. OTOH, google promises to keep a copy of everything ever created on it's server.

    • We talk about the kids facebook profile as a liability when they try to find jobs...

      What about a record of every email they sent in college. Every threat to a competing lover, every breakup, every plan to falsify grades.

      The nice thing about email on a schools server is that the mail is presumably gone when the student leaves college. OTOH, google promises to keep a copy of everything ever created on it's server.

      What were they doing sending that kind of shit on university email in the first place? The romance crap would just be embarrassing but plans to falsify grades would be grounds for expulsion. I guess if they're too dumb to plan effective crimes, they deserve to be found out.

  • There is a lot to be said about educated consumers...

    There was a time when you first went to college you got your first email account... and it was all bright and shinny...

    Today's kids may or may not have excellent email but they certainly have it and they certainly know what to expect from an account in terms of storage (a few gigs or more), spend, etc.

    Plus in the perfect world Google would pay the colleges to mandate their use, but $$ aside, my guess is if a kid has been using AOL mail, etc., they are not
  • My school just migrated over to Google Apps, or rather is in the process of migrating. I understand that network outages, though rare, can result in email downtime, or worse, emails lost forever. This is especially bad at my school, where by policy, official communication from the university to students and vice versa is done via email and email only (this may not be at all unique; I really don't know). However, I can see one great side effect of this, and it is that, if all goes according to plan, I will b
  • At the school I'm currently in, a lot of people already do use gmail. Unfortunately, none of them realize the consequences of putting their research up on servers the school can't control in terms of security, availability, and backups.

    Google or MSN could (and have) "accidentally" zapped email or entire accounts. That is a considerable danger to a research student using that service as their primary email address and "workspace".

    Will Google or MSN care (or even have the facilities) to:

    • Restore a fol
    • A year ago I lost 7 or 8 years worth of email in my Hotmail account because I got married- and was too busy to check my email for 30 days. Microsoft was kind enough to allow me to reactivate my account if I wished - but the email was gone. Note, some of that email predated Microsoft owning Hotmail.

      Needless to say, now I use my university's pop email server and download the emails locally - and back them up. I will never trust my personal archives to a company like that again.

  • Missed learning experience (Score:3, Interesting)

    by iamacat ( 583406 ) on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @07:50PM (#21499645)
    Students should run their own e-mail systems, period. Otherwise, how can IT students prepare for their real life work in future in a realistic environment? Sure the security will not be as tight as an offsite system. But, it is educational by itself to learn how to telnet to port 25 and send a hoax e-mail from Jesus Christ or from your professor. So is catching the hoaxer by looking at the message paths or catching a student admin reading others e-mails and putting him/her to public shame. Most of all, it's a critical part of education to realize that just because you can look at other people's files does not mean you should.

    If we remove the educational value of students interacting with each other and learning both skills and morals they will need to function in the outside world for the rest of their lives, we might as well outsource the whole university instead of just the e-mail system. Why not just have some good professors from India read the lecture and answer questions through online chat? Will certainly save students some money...

  • We do this here. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Honig the Apothecary ( 515163 ) on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @08:17PM (#21499857)
    I'm a satisfied user of Google Apps for Education. We did this transition back in August of this year for our users. We do not currently do student email through the service as there is not a good way short of the address formating to specify a student account vs a faculty or staff user. But we are going to have student email accounts next semester.

    To clear up a few misconceptions:
    1. Ads are turned off for our domain. Nobody will see a google ad in their email client.
    2. There is POP and IMAP support just like the normal gmail accounts.
    3. It is the most stable beta I've ever seen.

    The reason I pushed this is that it is relatively easy and their spam and virus filtering are way better than anything we tried here. I am the only one of the four IT staff that has a serious clue as to running a successful email system and I plan on leaving soon to pursue other opportunities as they say. Gapps is easy for my boss and the other support staff to manage.

    We are on connection that has not gone down for an unplanned outage since it was installed in May. Our previous connections were almost as stable with less than 10 minutes of downtime in a year.

    It is speedy, it is ubiquitous, and it is cost effective. If students have privacy concerns they can learn how to forward stuff to a POP account someplace else and delete the mail from the gmail box.
    • If students have privacy concerns they can learn how to forward stuff to a POP account someplace else and delete the mail from the gmail box.

      Right, because Google won't possible keep a copy in their massive we-know-everything-about-everybody-for-data-mining database. Google and privacy just don't go together.

  • Not for non-US Institutions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @08:28PM (#21499931) Journal
    Apparently we looked at it for the University I work at here in Canada but the administration rejected it out of hand. Everyone loved the technical aspects of GMail - the problem was that it was run by a US company. This means that the US government has the ability to force emails to be handed over which, in almost all circumstances, would be a violation of Canadian privacy laws thus leaving the university in very hot water.

    Given some of the recent claims from Mr. Bush and co. even having the servers located in Canada would not be sufficient protection as long as it was a US company owning them. So, despite Google's excellent technical product and general trustworthiness, I don't see many countries where there are any sort of privacy laws being able to sensibly use it. In fact the university are very uncomfortable with faculty using personal GMail accounts for exactly the same reason.
    • That's a very valid reason to avoid google and microsoft, but aren't some Canadian companies offering similar services? Actually I could imagine USians turning to Canadian / European services because they have more end-user/consumer-friendly laws.

  • Entrenched habits? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mswope ( 242988 ) on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @08:30PM (#21499947) Journal
    "as schools grapple with entering freshmens' already entrenched online habits." Since when has this been a problem, let alone a priority for schools? Did schools somehow become democracies that care what the students previous habits were in things like email? How does it teach them anything, if they don't expose them to different environments and conditions that don't conform to what they do in their bedrooms at home? What will happen to them in the corporate world, or military world, or just about any workplace that has a modicum of technology "to deal with?"

  • Gmail appliance? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by edmicman ( 830206 ) on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @09:16PM (#21500313) Homepage Journal
    Wouldn't this perfectly suit a gmail appliance? Personally, I think Gmail's interface for webmail is the best out there. I ended up biting the bullet and moving my personal domain to their free hosted services because I can't offer 5GB of email space to my friends with standard hosting, nor offer the reliability of gmail. But I still have in the back of my mind that ultimately everything is on Google's servers. They're probably better able to handle maintenance than me, but still.

    They already have a search appliance. Why not a standalone email appliance that schools and businesses could install, hook it up to gobs of storage space, and there ya go? Hell, make a whole standalone Google Apps appliance, and tear Exchange a new one. You get to keep the email in-house, plus with great search, but with the Google stamp of goodness. I'd give an arm and a leg for this!

  • Google Should Pay Up (Score:3, Insightful)

    by More Trouble ( 211162 ) on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @09:49PM (#21500505)
    The idea of providing these services "for free" is laughable. Google's business is advertising. What is more valuable to Google than knowing every online activity for a demographic like "recent college graduates"? If Google would like to have access to that data, the Universities should be selling it to Google for what it's worth -- presumably much more than it costs to provide email. Of course, maybe members of the University communities wouldn't like to have their personal information auctioned off to the highest bidder.

    :w

  • My school does this (Score:4, Informative)

    by pcgabe ( 712924 ) on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @09:52PM (#21500519) Homepage Journal
    We use Hotmail as our e-mail provider.

    It's pretty much like regular Hotmail (5gigs of space), but we use the school's .edu domain, we only have to log in once every 365 days to keep our account from being deleted, and we can forward our mail out to our real accounts.

    The advantage is that, well, now we have an e-mail provider. A few years ago, my school didn't offer e-mail for students at all, so anything that required an .edu e-mail address (e.g. Facebook, back when that was still a useful service) was out of reach.

    The disadvantage is ...well, it's still Hotmail. I don't know if you've used it recently, but it's not that great. Sure, having to type my password in every time (no matter how many times I click that "remember my password" checkbox) is annoying, having to click three separate links to fully log-out so I can check my old Hotmail account is annoying, and if we forget that our mail goes through Hotmail and just read it in the destination account for more than a year? Baleeted.

    But that all pales next to the truly horrid spam filter. Far more often than not, it has flagged legitimate e-mails as spam and spam e-mails as legitimate. The only way to even KNOW that you're missing an e-mail that is stuck in spambox hell is to log in to your account. Nothing is forwarded out, and THERE'S NO WAY TO DISABLE IT COMPLETELY. So half my real e-mails get caught in the spam filter, rendering the entire account totally useless.

    It may be free, but I'm not sure it's worth the price.
    • As a former student and current adjunct, my only concern about academic email is whether or not I can keep my institutional domain. Publishers, academic institutions, and potential employers often use your email's domain as a kind of digital letterhead. For example, I recently contacted the AstroBio group at NASA-Ames for some classroom material. I suspect the fast and courteous response I received was due in some part to the "@cuny.edu" in the sender line. Sure, I route all my mail into one inbox, but
    • I can do you one better. The hotmail account that I opened has blocked 90% of the emails _I_ sent to it, none of them anything like a spam message. And, they weren't in a spambox, they were just _gone_. Worst email service ever.
  • I work for a very, very, very large University (while also going to school), and one of my bosses floated the idea of outsourcing email to Microsoft. It was apparently brought up by MS, and some very higher-ups were thinking about it. I pointed out a number of the flaws, including vendor lock-in (which is paramount to me) and made it clear that if they decided to do so, I would not only quit but immediately start sending letters to the newspaper about how they were selling out students to make/save a litt

  • Why not require a valid e-mail address before the first day of school or during the admission process? I did not benefit from my university's privacy policies and I just got as much spam as the next guy. To collect e-mail addresses all one had to do was to login to a server and type 'cd $HOME; cd ..; ls'; then add @.'. The downside of using non-school e-mail is that if something happens to Gmail, then students with Gmail accounts may be left out from grades, memos, etc. If a school's system goes down, you

  • "It is good if Google does it, but very bad if MS does, for reasons that do not have any basis in logic."

    There, now everyone doesn't have to write all their replies out.
  • So are the schools going to get any cuts from all of the user information and emails that are going to be scanned for better targeting advertisements?
  • New York University has switched to SSL email for a reason; private communications between students/registrar, student/faculty, department heads, student/bursar, etc.

    Why would a college have such insecure email for important information? Do they just not email anything that private?

Slashdot Top Deals

Life is cheap, but the accessories can kill you.

Close