Outsourcing Email

When E-Mail Is Outsourced

Excerpt:

In the world of e-mail, outsourcing means two things: Google or Microsoft. Both have been marketing Web-based messaging services to small businesses, nonprofits and other groups, and they’ve focused more intensely on the higher education market over the past year. Besides services that are completely free and interfaces that are familiar to students, they offer a wide array of features, tools that let people collaborate in real time — and of course, the cool factor.

The availability of viable options outside of the university IT department has forced administrators to consider the consequences of abandoning their in-house e-mail systems. Does it make financial sense to keep spending resources on aging proprietary software when it’s available on the Web? Do colleges’ services still offer advantages over those reflexively preferred by students? And in offloading a primary function of the campus information technology infrastructure, what role would remain for administrators who previously oversaw e-mail services?

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Many students have come to demand e-mail access at close to real time, integrated chat and several gigabytes of space because that’s what’s freely available from such competing services as Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail. The ad-supported offerings have taken advantage of massive economies of scale to effectively make storage limits and e-mail clients a thing of the past. At the University of Pennsylvania, where 2 of the 12 schools are phasing in Microsoft’s Live @ edu, there was no comparison between the old 75-megabyte limit and the five gigabytes now available, said Ira Winston, the executive director of computing and educational technology services for three of the schools.

“We just can’t keep up with the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo,” he said. Since students are already coming in with their own accounts, and with 30 percent of them forwarding their college mail to personal inboxes, the debate wasn’t whether to partner with one of the Web services — it was “who to outsource to.”

The outcome of that decision didn’t necessarily weigh heavily on Winston. Since Google and Microsoft’s contracts are relatively short-term and non-exclusive, choosing a provider won’t lock in a college indefinitely, and different units within an institution can potentially use separate e-mail systems. Students can still always forward their e-mail. For Winston, the most important element was “providing the best services to our students and not constraining them to any one provider,” he said. “It almost doesn’t matter who you pick.”

Comment: Outsource your email and your users will be happy (imagine 5 gigabytes of email space instead of 10 or 20 megabytes!) and there will be no Exchange servers to be upgraded, have a BCP plan, etc.