I got an email in my inbox today announcing that the university will be transferring all taught students’ email accounts to Google Apps for Education (also previously discussed on Chris Sexton’s blog). As is fairly standard, university email has until now been handled in-house. I’ve never had any problems with it: it’s reliable, and the webmail interface (based on Horde Imp) is clunky but dependable.However, it’s never compared with either the interface or the storage available with Google Mail. As soon as Google enabled POP3 download I set that up and I’ve never looked back. I think it’s great that the university is outsourcing its email to Google, and this is going to mean a major improvement in the student experience; after all, most students use email as instinctively as breathing these days.
It seems to be a win for everyone. Google gets a whole generation of students exposed to more of its products. The university gets email services for free while allowing its support staff to concentrate on doing the stuff they specialise in: supporting the institutions educational and research needs.
My one issue so far is that this change is currently only affecting taught students. Research students and staff will still be on the old system for a while yet. I can understand that some staff, at least, will be more resistant to this change than the students, who are with us for a few years at most. I also know a number of staff who, like the students, don’t like the current system because it’s a bit dated and awkward to use at times. It looks like I’ll be sticking with my own GMail account for now, but the transfer to Google Apps for staff/research students certainly gets my vote.
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Hi, I'm Jez. Welcome to my blog, where I talk about learning, teaching and educational technology.
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Hmm….I love google for all it does so effectively but I really want to see a strong competitor here else it surely will lead to problems in future. Over dependence is lethal. As you rightly said, everyone (not only students) use emails nowadays like breathing, once you control something as vital as that, without any threats, dangerous. For example Gazprom.
Hi AC, thanks for stopping by. I agree, overdependence is a big danger, and I hope CICS negotiate a favourable contract with a good service level agreement to provide some level of protection. There’s always a risk associated with outsourcing and going with a massive player like Google, particularly for such a central service as email, has both advantages and disadvantages.
In a more general sense, I think Google is starting to recognise that it can’t continue to be successful by owning the whole internet: it’s whole business model is based on trust and as they head towards. I think it’s interesting that syndication is a cornerstone of Google Wave. Since it’s an open protocol, you can build your own server, and base it on Google’s open source codebase or not as you wish. No dependence on Google. If Wave succeeds, it will be a big win for generous, open business practices. If not, it will have been an interesting experiment and hopefully we’ll learn a lot from it.