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U of M to go with Gmail
Minnesota allows switch; UW to alter WiscMail in fall
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In an effort to save money and increase technological opportunities for students, University of Minnesota colleges will allow students and staff to switch their Internet messaging services to Gmail and other Google Apps.
Students and staff will have the option of switching to Google Apps, which includes e-mail and other services like Google Docs, in the beginning of the fall semester. The school eventually plans to make the use of Google Apps mandatory for all students and faculty as a more cost-efficient method of operating.
“In addition to increased productivity opportunities, Google Apps also will allow the university to save costs in the long-run by reducing the need to buy and support software, hardware and storage to maintain our own independent e-mail service,” according to the university’s website.
The new system is subject to the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects the privacy of health information, and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which protects student educational records, though the school is still working to clarify privacy details.
Storing some faculty and staff information does make the situation more complex, and the university said it will be doing further research to make sure that data is safe on Google’s servers.
Although other universities have made the change as well, the University of Wisconsin has no plans of giving up WiscMail just yet.
According to Brian Rust, communications manager for DoIT, the university would not benefit economically from switching to Gmail.
“[Switching isn’t] really free, because you still have to retain staff that manages the system on behalf of the university,” Rust said. “You have to draw up a contract, manage the flow of the mail, maintain servers for their mail, so it’s not as though you can just say, ‘We’re going to save hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars by switching’ because we’re still doing certain things by house.”
Rust added the university is also worried about the privacy of university and student e-mails.
Rust said he thinks WiscMail is a better alternative than submitting e-mails to a third-party vendor, though in the current WiscMail system, all e-mails are retained for a day and the university has the rights to manage the content.
“It’s like you’re entrusting someone you don’t know with copies of papers you spent many, many hours creating,” Rust said. “What could they do with that? You’d just assume nobody else be able to see or use the contents, and faculty and staff are even more concerned about that.”
Rust added Google is not responsible for lost e-mails or system failures.
Rust added the university is, however, responding to anecdotal evidence of growing Gmail popularity by restructuring the web interface for WiscMail.
This new interface will be up and running in the fall.
Officials from the University of Minnesota were not available for comment as of press time.
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Yes, it seems WI ,ust be different from all the other entities that have successfully switched to GOOGLE gmail and saved $: Harvard, Notre Dame, Hofstra University, Vanderbilt Univ, Dartmouth,Northwestern Univ, St. Louis Univ, Arizona State, Univ of Southern CA, UCLA Law School, Univ of Virginia, Univ of Fairbanks, Univ of Utah, Trinity University, ect ect.. Plus when UW at Milwaukee spent $500,000 to go to ZIMBRA, they stated they reduced staff?!?! Oh…seems the story was the UW email system was DOWN most of Wednesday???
UW Parkside converted to MSLIVE and seemed to SAVE and reduce staff work??
Is WI looking at the issue correctly? when so many other Educational entities have converted?? even K-12 school districts..??
More information needed…
I’ve since graduated a few years now, but I have to wonder if any incoming freshman are even using their wisc.edu email. They all already have established 3rd-party email accounts they used throughout high school.
Considering how many students use Gmail to interface with and respond to their WiscMail messages, DoIT is really dropping the ball here. You can’t possibly tell me money would not be saved by making the switch. How much does it cost to maintain enough storage space for each Wiscmail user’s quota? A quick look on DoIT’s ‘quota’ site (http://www.doit.wisc.edu/wiscmail/quota/ ) tells us it is ‘extremely expensive.’
Cut some costs, DoIT. Do it now.
screw this
it’s about time, WiscMail absolutely sucks.
Noooooooo, please no gmail for work!! it’s terrible! i use it for personal email and it’s not even that great for that because of the lack of option to unthread conversations. i need to be able to glance at my in box to see if my boss emailed me, and that’s not possible in gmail if his email is part of a threaded conversation, it could be buried under someone else’s more recent post on the same subject. i agree that wiscmail could use some better features, i’m looking forward to that. but i don’t want work, school and personal email combined.
Of course this Rust guy thinks it’s a bad idea, if they switched he’d probably lose his job!
And I trust Google with my mail and documents on a daily basis, what’s the big deal?
Among the things I tried to communicate to Ms. Cox are:
Questions of content ownership, use and service reliability prohibit us from switching faculty and staff to a third-party system. They (as well as some students) are UW employees. Our mail system handles content such as intellectual property, employment and medical records. We do not want to leave that to a third party.
Cost-savings is usually one of the primary reasons for switching to a third-party email system. The differential cost to add and maintain student accounts as part of an email system for employees is not that great.
That said, the UW-Madison (DoIT) has analyzed the cost/benefit of converting student WiscMail to systems like Gmail, Microsoft mail and others. So far, and given the size and complexity relative to a number of campuses that have converted to third-party mail, it isn’t cost effective for us to do so. We continue to monitor the value of alternatives, as we do for all enterprise services we provide.
Stated another way, free isn’t free when it comes to converting all student mail to a third party system. The UW would still need to be involved in managing the service between the third-party provider and WiscMail accounts.
Relatively few students, staff and faculty forward their email from WiscMail to a third-party service provider. We would expect to see a majority of accounts forwarded if WiscMail was inadequate.
DoIT regularly gathers customer feedback on the enterprise systems that we maintain (including WiscMail). As a result, and as Ms. Cox indicated above, we are improving the interface and performance of WiscMail this spring and summer.
I hope this helps clarify what was covered and missed in the article.
Brian, I’m curious, how do you know most students, staff and faculty don’t forward their WiscMail? I don’t forward it, I use POP3 to take all messages from my WiscMail and put it on my Gmail account, and everybody I know who uses the Internet as much as I do does the exact same thing. I know several student organizations actually require people to use Gmail for the convenience of Google Calendar and Google Docs.
Even if the switch isn’t totally cost effective, it should be done since Gmail’s interface is 10,000 times better than WiscMail could ever be, and therefore making the switch is in the best interest of students.
That is the point you’re missing.
So, go ahead and POP or forward your WiscMail to Gmail. If that is what you want, then DoIT isn’t stopping you; heck they even document how to do it!
http://kb.wisc.edu/wiscmail/page.php?id=5989
DoIT also isn’t stopping students from using Google Calendar and Google Docs. Go ahead and create an account on Google and start using those services. You don’t need DoIT to do it for you.
All this DoIT bashing is immature and unprofessional.
Jim Kreilich,
WiscMail was not down on Wednesday. Perhaps you had network issues.
The Virginia Community College System (aka www.VCCS.edu) consists of 23 colleges, 40 campuses, and approximately 300,000 students each year. They converted to the FREE GOOGLE gmailin Sept 09’an projected at a minimum, a $675,000 ANNUAL savings. This did not include savings in staff, training, consulting, etc..only the Hardware and licensing for their previous email system!
And yet, the UW doesn’t think it could save money by going to a more feature rich and FREE email system???? It doesn’t compute !!!
Why should DoIT or the UW mandate use of Gmail to students or staff?
I don’t understand why any university would do this. Every student already has an email address when they get here. If they’re looking to cut the budget, why not let the students use whatever address they already have - we don’t need an @wisc.edu address provided by Google.
Honestly, why would any university throw potential advertisement targets and all the profits they generate to any large corporation, be it Google or Microsoft or Yahoo? Oh I guess it’s because Google’s cool and has the “Do No Evil” philosophy. Maybe if Google was sharing those profits with the UW for delivering those customers, it would make sense, but otherwise, I just don’t get it.
Maybe Jim Kreilich and some of the others calling for the switch to Gmail have some Google stock?
I think Jim was referring to the old articles about WiscMail that appears in the related stories section of this page. The outage was in 2003. Not very relevant.
On the other hand, at least WiscMail is forthcoming when they do have problems. Maybe that just provides ammo to those “DoIT haters”. But I think that this honesty speaks highly of them.
I’ve read many articles about Gmail going down frequently, and sometimes even losing email. But Google never admits these problems. Are you sure you want to put your trust in a corporation that lies to its own users?
Why should DoIT or the UW mandate use of Gmail to students or staff?
I don’t understand why any university would do this. Every student already has an email address when they get here. If they’re looking to cut the budget, why not let the students use whatever address they already have - we don’t need an @wisc.edu address provided by Google.
Honestly, why would any university throw potential advertisement targets and all the profits they generate to any large corporation, be it Google or Microsoft or Yahoo? Oh I guess it’s because Google’s cool and has the “Do No Evil” philosophy. Maybe if Google was sharing those profits with the UW for delivering those customers, it would make sense, but otherwise, I just don’t get it.
Maybe some of those calling for the switch to Gmail have some Google stock?
Jim: yes, you can save money on storing email by outsourcing. But you are missing the larger picture.
Not a high percentage of schools have outsourced, so listing off those that outsource doesn’t prove anything other than you know how to go a Google search.
Most of those that have outsourced have only done it for students. They still have to maintain a system for faculty and staff.
Notre Dame for example, outsourced students to Gmail, but continue to provide anti-spam/virus scanning for students (so they can have the @nd.edu address) and optionally allow privacy-conscious students be hosted locally. Then they moved faculty and staff (and some students, student employees, grad students) to a more expensive Exchange system.
It is arguable that they pay more now than they did before. But it’s all a matter of how costs are calculated; almost always in the favor of the decision that was made. (Did you know that 80% of statistics lie?)
Very few schools have outsourced faculty and staff. And those that have probably aren’t big research schools. UW brings in $800 million/year in research grants (second in the country) so that makes our Intellectual Property very valuable. Researchers would revolt if DoIT tried to put their email on Google’s servers.
The cost of hosting students on an existing faculty/staff system is minimal due to economies of scale. And the benefits of consolidation (email is reliably and promptly delivered) are extremely beneficial to the learning environment. Remember that the UW Registrar forced all students to use their WiscMail account precisely because faculty and staff were having problems delivering mail to students’ freemail accounts.
Those students that prefer to use a freemail provider are welcome to POP or forward their mail elsewhere.
To the person who asked …
“how do you know most students, staff and faculty don’t forward their WiscMail? I don’t forward it, I use POP3 to take all messages from my WiscMail and put it on my Gmail account, and everybody I know who uses the Internet as much as I do does the exact same thing. I know several student organizations actually require people to use Gmail for the convenience of Google Calendar and Google Docs.”
I asked one of our techs to check current accounts that forward email from WiscMail to a third party provider. He said it looks like roughly 10% of POP traffic is from Google. So that means roughly 1% of users POP their mail to Google. On the other hand, close to 50% of those that forward do so to Google (3-4% of all users). So, add them up, and we’re still at about 5%. BTW, most of the off campus POP traffic is coming from cell phone providers.
As for your comment about Gmail being “10,000 times better than WiscMail,” all I have to say is … wow. And hang on til this spring/summer when we intro the new interface.
Haha! Go Gophers!!!
gmail went down again http://lifehacker.com/5245537/gmail-suffers-early+morning-outage-again
no word from Google of course. maybe you should call their help desk. oh, they don’t have one.
perhaps wiscmail should just shut down for 20 minutes every week, and disband the help desk. if the budget gets really tight, they can just randomly delete mail from accounts.
if google does it, it must not be evil.
Appears the Milwaukee Technical College System is adopting the GOOGLE gmail for FREE…with the advanced capabilities the the Univ of MN is also going for…. www.matc.edu Times article..
http://media.www.matctimes.com/media/storage/paper696/news/2009/05/14/Wired/Gmail.For.Students-3740423.shtml?refsource=collegeheadlines
Gateway Technical College (29,000 students, 5,000 Full time) convert to GOOGLE gmail…cite SAVING TAXPAYER $$$, ENHANCING STUDENT BENEFITS, EASY DECISION…Sept 1, 2009 Kenosha, Racine, Elkhorn,Burlington campuses
“Gateway to provide student e-mail services through Google Apps Shift to Google Apps benefits students, taxpayers”
LINK: http://www.gtc.edu/publications/News%20Releases/2009/2009nr91_google.pdf