Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Google Offers Free Campus Email.

A TIME magazine article from last Friday 8/14:
"Google and Microsoft: The Battle Over College E-Mail"







"When Notre Dame hired out their e-mail to Google last year, the school saved $1.5 million in storage and other tech costs"

I feel extremely fortunate to have stumbled upon this article while searching for a distraction from studying for a summer final. I had no idea Google offered this free service and am especially excited for its potential to actually save our University some operating funds! I already forward my UHmail to Gmail and love every aspect of it--especially the "Labels" (the automatic filters are very convenient) and "Calender" (along with "tasks", saves my life)...and "Themes" are always fun!

Google "Labs" is also constantly coming up with improvements. Recent features include an improved Gtalk Instant messaging function connected to your automatically updated address book, and an "undo send" option!

[caption id="attachment_343" align="aligncenter" width="510" caption="The color scheme and "sky" actually changes with the time of day and weather...I check my email at least 30 times a day, I just want to be comfortable when I do!"][/caption]

I requested for an UHmail increase in my personal bandwidth allowance, from 100mb-250mb but even that is still not nearly enough for myself and many college students. Google, on the other hand, offers close to 74gb (7,359mb).

For UHM student readers, I'm scheduling a meeting with ITS next week to discuss this initiative.

14 comments:

  1. [...] Google-Integrated Campus Email? « Marking Many Milestones [...]

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  2. interesting... do you know if any publics have gone with them? sorry, i did not read the article.

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  3. calendar? im sold lol

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  4. Earl-Jay PadillaearAugust 19, 2009 at 2:12 AM

    is it possible for u to bring this up with some adminstration people in future meetings?

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  5. you're very proactive when it comes to these kinds of things, you're doing a great job mr. president

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  6. this is genius. do it.

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  7. hell yes! I'll sign the petition haha

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  8. Our school's email system is gmail based, its so fast and effective.

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  9. eh this is pretty interesting!!! we should find out how much money is spent to handle our email system? Also, it could really save us money, by offering more benefits to the email.

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  10. "Arizona State estimated that its savings with Google were $400,000 per year. Washington State University, meanwhile, expects to save about $100,000 by working with Microsoft. "

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  11. I'm scheduling a meeting with ITS next week: The only admin that matters at this point...

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  12. Great idea! I'd love to see this being implemented. The school could probably save a lot of money and prevent a lot of spam messages from getting through (and from our email servers from being exploited). The UH probably has to pay for a subscription to the email filter service, and even though it might not be the most expensive cost to the UH right now, it takes a lot of manpower to maintain email servers, which translates to even more costs (forgive me webdevs!)

    One thing to worry about though is internal UH emails, especially sensitive ones, that you would have to trust with Google and its security system. And the UH currently uses a system called "listserv" to send mass emails to students, which requires an authoritive figure (usually some kind of department head) to approve the bulk sending. Although I'm pretty sure Google has a mass send feature, I'm not sure if they have the same kind of approval system (and even our current system is not always the most secure thing - sometimes those authoritative figures can be manipulated by a crafty email to approve spam or phishing emails). Network lag due to the email servers not being under UH control and being located on the mainland should hopefully not be a problem - most of us use Gmail anyway, I have my UH mail being forwarded to a Gmail account that I've had for years.

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