Improving Student Email
GOAL
To improve student email while saving money at the same time. The University should provide email accounts to students with the following features:
- name@wustl.edu email address
- Increased storage space
- Integrated document repository
- Integrated and shareable calendar
- Minimal or no cost to the University to provide
- Integration with the WUSTL Key
- No 3rd party advertisements for student email accounts
PROCESS
The Student Email Group (SEG) is a committee made up of representatives from the academic divisions, University General Counsel, Office of Public Affairs, Student Technology Services (STS), Information Services & Technology(IS&T), Alumni & Development and the Student Body President.
This committee has sent out a Request for Proposal (RFP) to multiple vendors with a detailed list of requirements. Here are some of the tools that we have contacted vendors about. Please learn more information about teach and leave comments with your opinions, preferences, concerns, etc.
Google Apps for Education
Google Apps for Education will allow the University to provide student email accounts using Gmail for free. Each account would maintain the @wustl.edu affiliation.
Google Apps for Education has the following features:
- 7.2 GB inbox
- Shared calendar and contacts
- Online document storage with 10 GB of total storage for entire domain.
To learn more about Google Apps for Education, please go to http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/
Microsoft Live@Edu
Microsoft Live@Edu will allow the University to provide student email accounts using Windows Live Hotmail or Microsoft Live Outlook (Exchange) for free. Each account would maintain the @wustl.edu affiliation.
Microsoft Live@Edu has the following features with the Microsoft Live Outlook version:
- 10 GB inbox with 20 MB attachment limit
- Integrated directory and address Book with faculty/staff that use Microsoft Exchange **NOTE: All the staff in the Olin Business School and other portions of the University administration use Microsoft Exchange**
- Shared calendar and contacts
- Online document storage with 25 GB of storage space for each user.
To learn more about Microsoft Live@Edu, please go to http://get.liveatedu.com/Education/Connect/
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Comments
I don't know whether this holds true with the @live.edu package, but for hotmail accounts, students actually don't have the *option* of forwarding to other accounts, unless those other accounts are with Microsoft (so no forwarding to Gmail). There is, of course, always the option of using POP/IMAP, although that defeats the purpose of putting everything in one place, as you'd need to log into each site separately to check each email address, unless you happen to be at your own computer. Perhaps @live.edu does not have the same limitation as hotmail here though; that would be worth checking into.
Oh, and now that I think of it, I believe Google said that their product *will* interface with the Microsoft Exchange services Olin uses, including calendar sharing, etc. Although obviously if either package is chosen, it will be replacing Olin's current email system... But either way, students will still have full interaction with faculty using Exchange. Not too much difference between Google and Microsoft here, as far as I know - i'm not a business student, however.
I should have clarified here — I meant that a Hotmail account cannot be forwarded to a Gmail account, and I was concerned that this was the case with live@edu. It appears that live@edu does *not* have this limitation, however, or that it can at least be worked around, as the John Marshall Law School appears to have done. Rest still stands. (Like the poster below me, I also use a Mac and forward to Gmail, so I may be a bit biased, although I also have two accounts with Microsoft :) )
Actually, the Microsoft option, Outlook Live, now supports full functionality across browsers. Safari and Firefox are now fully supported alongside Internet Explorer. Microsoft just started rolling this out recently.
Glad to hear that, I admit that I wasn't aware (is there a mobile version, too? It isn't obvious from any of their copy). However, I believe my other points still stand.
Both options that are being considered, Microsoft and Google, support the use of WUSTL Key credentials.
Slightly off-topic, but this is an important point nevertheless:
"All of our e-mail will go through their servers running on hardware that we don't have access to"
I'm not sure everyone will feel comfortable giving a 3rd party access to university email. Regardless of how well known the company is, we are giving them access to an enormous amount of private data.
I'm an engineering student, and I take advantage of Sendmail's ability to automatically forward email to an address specified in the ~/.forward file to forward all my email to my Gmail account. I don't know if this capability is offered by the other schools, but I believe that it is a much better solution to the problem. Those who are interested in using a Gmail account can have everything transparently forwarded to their Gmail account (and use their wustl.edu alias to send/reply to emails, directly from the Gmail interface), while everyone else is free to continue using the university's hosting.
I think it's pretty clear that the easiest course of action would be to just let Google handle it, but I don't think it would be the right one. When I configured my wustl.edu email account to forward to Gmail, I had to SSH into my account and modify that file by hand. The majority of the student body is not capable of doing that.
Therefore, the best solution is that if there is enough demand among students for Google's email services, the IT departments should simply offer a simple and straightforward way to set up forwarding to Gmail, but not foist it on the entire university population.
What "data privacy protections?" What does Microsoft have in place that Google lacks? Your post is very vague and "hand-wavy."
The gist of what the Google representatives had to say at their presentation was that there is no "lack of user data privacy protections." The guarantee complete data confidentiality/privacy, with a clearly defined set of exceptions:
- If Google is subpoenaed, they have the right to provide information to a court of law.
- Your data can be shared if there is perceived to be a threat to the company. This does NOT mean that Google is parsing through your data looking for suspicious plans, but rather that a school administrator could request a check-up if there are reasonable grounds for suspicion. Note, if the University provided an on-campus data-handling alternative, administrators would STILL have this option, as they currently do. Microsoft would also provide the administration with the means to deal with threats this way — like it or not, it's simply necessary.
- Unlike Microsoft, Google does generate advertisements (this only applies to alumni, not students) based on email content. This is done by real-time iteration over data each time the page loads - no data is shared, stored, or compromised. Microsoft does the exact same thing when using a computer program to filter spam, as do most all mail clients. It's just a memory-less algorithm that looks for keywords and does a one-time useful reaction to them, which does not involve storing, copying, or elsewise sharing your data.
- Google occasionaly brings in partner businesses to do repairs on datastructures. Those companies have basic access to the servers with your data, but they are under the same binding contracts as Google employees, and cannot do anything with your data, give it to others, or send you unsolicited mail. This is really not an issue.
Hope that clears this up some! Feel free to check Google's privacy agreements if you need more details though.
I wouldn't compare the Google interface to Hotmail. The Microsoft solution that is being considered is not the one based on Hotmail. It is called Outlook Live (formerly Exchange Labs). It is a completely different system with a compeletly different look and feel if you access via the web.
For the love of God, just switch everything over to google. My fiance is a grad student at SLU. ALL of SLU goes through gmail apps. It is so incredibly simple and perfect. Nothing else compares. If you know a student at SLU, check out their school email account. It's amazing and it's unthinkable to do anything else.
It's worth mentioning that Google Apps is only free for user accounts, and this is only the basic service. The non-education version of Google Apps is somewhere around $50/user/year (last time I checked). Google, in an effort to make money, recently changed their education discount from something like 70% to something like 20%. In addition, schools may be required, for legal reasons, to purchase additional services to archive all emails for a certain period of time, adding to the cost of the service.
My school recently priced out the minimum legally-viable package from Google for the amount of accounts we have, and it came to something in the $80k range (for ~6000 accounts), not a significant savings from the current on-site hosted Exchange system we use now, which only costs $2/user (one-time fee per server version). I would imagine the price for Google Apps would be a bit higher for your campus.
Google E-Mail is incredibly easy to use, just a terrific system. WashU-- Please switch to Goggle E-Mail!
More capability, more storage, collaboration with Outlook -- the Windows product is a better fit for this campus as a whole!
Google is amazing and has the fewest problems. So easy to use!
Does anyone know if Microsoft's POP3 and mail forwarding policies are the same with the educational package as they are for hotmail accounts? I do know that I've become very frustrated with hotmail, which offers no options for automatic mail forwarding services *except* if the account you're forwarding to is another @live/@hotmail/@msn address, which is a nuisance of a policy in my opinion.
This is less of an issue now, but it was especially inconvenient before Microsoft enabled POP3 for hotmail accounts a mere few months ago. If POP3 will be disabled on educational email accounts for students, that would be a deal-breaker in my opinion - Being able to work through a non-browser-based email client is basically essential to me.
Live@Edu, based on Microsoft Exchange, allows you to access your e-mail via IMAP, POP, EWS, or MAPI (Microsoft Outlook). So, compared to Hotmail, you have a greater selection of options to use when connecting your e-mail client to Exchange.
I have never had problems with any aspect of google, and it works flawlessly on both PCs and Macs, which will be incredibly valuable for WU students.
Why can't each of us just make our school email forward to gmail.com and not have to make SU go through the whole business of it?
Currently a lot of students do that, but by going this route lots of other opportunities open up, one of which would be that the university saves money by not hosting the forwarding servers. And it's always good if you can send emails *from* a @wustl.edu account too :)
Additionally, Google and Microsoft both offer fairly expansive applications with the basic email service: chat, website hosting, calendars, document storage, document editing, general storage, the ability to manage multiple email addresses, and synchronization with your phone/pda/whatever. (These services vary between the two venders, however).
It's totally debatable whether students really *need* all of those services, but if you start to look into how it all works (especially the ability to share calendars and collaboratively work on documents) there certainly are some great opportunities that could come from either vender that we don't have now.
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