Choosing a Replacement Email System For a University? 485
SmarkWoW writes "The university I attend is currently looking to change the way in which is provides its students with an email service. In the past they used a legacy mail system which can no longer fit their needs. A committee has narrowed the possibilities down to three vendors: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Representatives from these three vendors will be coming to our college and giving a presentation on the advantages of their systems. We're looking at other services these companies provide such as calendaring and integration with existing software that our university runs. What questions would Slashdot readers ask during these Q&A sessions? Which of these three companies would you recommend? Why? What advantages would each have that college-level students would take advantage of? What other aspects should we consider when making our decision?"
what happens if... (Score:5, Informative)
Hi there
first how do I backup the system ?
( what your really asking is if your software system fails and it will all systems fail (e.g. gmail outage for a day) how quickly can I recover?)
we get attacked by a certain type of worm can I insert a rule into everyones policy to get rid of that ?
(its been delivered the filters did not catch it I want to reach in and take it away)
how do i get a log and bodies of the email sent out of the system for legal ?
how do I control the sending policy ?
(I dont want just anyone sending mail on behalf of my domain some people i want to restrict to only email inside the domain )
how can I add all the address's before people arrive ?
how does it work with mobiles ?
there's a start
regards
john jones
http://www.johnjones.me.uk [johnjones.me.uk]
disclaimer : I work in groupware but for a different vender my blog reflects this
On Site (Score:5, Informative)
If the university requires/forces students to use their .edu email account, then I feel that having the hardware and service on-site is a bare minimum. A lot of private information can _sometimes_ be required. So the organization requiring the use of the email account should be directly responsible as much as possible.
On a side note have secure SMTP and IMAP is a big deal for me. I know Microsoft tends not to offer IMAP support for their new, Live (offsite) service. So Microsoft's Live Mail service has two big NO-NOs for me.
IMAP and SSL (Score:3, Informative)
The most important : support both POPS and IMAPS, as well as SMTPS.
There is no reason not supporting this in any system deployed in the 90's or later.
A good webmail such as gmail (and not like outlook web access) is also worth considering.
For what it is worth (Score:2, Informative)
I certainly hope you are not leaving the students out of the loop, for they are your customers after all. Let them know what is on the table and discuss it with them. Their input could be valuable in many unseen ways.
The university I am attending here in the US is using gmail, but it is renamed and using a .edu address. I like it much better than other accounts I have had from other providers (Yahoo, MS, ect). It is much easier to filter/manipulate/read than the others, and also better at filtering spam. 99.9% of the spam I have gotten is from the school and always labeled "IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT" in the subject (I'm looking at YOU, ETSU, for spamming crap that is not important to students). Anything with those two words goes straight to the shit pile...
Re:Missing option: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:3 choices? Ramifications? (Score:3, Informative)
Yahoo started offering perpetual licenses in response to the Zimbra scare. Zimbra is also open-source, but you have to pay for the Outlook, iCal, and Mobile connectors.
It's easily one of the best collaboration packages with a few loose ends. Don't equate Zimbra with Yahoo just because Yahoo has lost its touch. I don't think Zimbra has lost its touch.
Re:3 choices? Ramifications? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Must be a pretty crappy university. (Score:2, Informative)
If your university is going to rely on one of those 3 companies for something as critical as email, one has to wonder whether your computer related faculty and staff are really up to the task of teaching about modern technology. Seriously, setting up a proper instance of something like Zimbra is not that big a deal.
It's the University of Washington.
The former IT management (now gone, after losing $40million) decided to set up an Exchange server for everybody because UW's president wanted one for his Blackberry. Later, they discovered that it was too expensive to offer Exchange to all the students, and they decided to tell the students to use Gmail or Live@Edu.
Faculty and staff who've been migrated to Exchange hate it. Many have asked to get back onto the IMAP servers.
There's nothing wrong with those servers. They got a major hardware and software upgrade last year. However, all the people who worked on those servers were laid off last May, and have found new jobs. The few people still there are quite demoralized and have been deserting the sinking ship.
So they're stuck with The Plan, even as the magnitude of its idiocy becomes clear.
Re:Don't use Yahoo Mail (Score:3, Informative)
ok well no I am not as wise as you !
seriously
first i would maybe give them a call or send them a support email asking exactly why this is the case and then if the service is not satisfactory i would move my email storage to a different place stop paying them and put a default filter to forward the email to my new address
update all my contacts with my new address indicating the problem
you can vote with your feet and money...
that way corporations listen
regards
John Jones
Re:Missing the point - can save money (Score:2, Informative)
Site licensing? I never had heard that yahoo and microsoft do this, so I'm only aware of google's terms, but they do offer google apps (gmail, docs, etc) for universities and schools with no ads for free... see http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/index.html for the whole list of things supported, terms, etc.... it seems the only thing that will not be free is google video for domains (according to the site: "Free to all users through March 8, 2009 ($10 per user, per year thereafter)" ).
Re:what happens if... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The most important question... (Score:3, Informative)
Exchange is great. No jokin'. If you have the right staff, who don't treat it like an SMTP engine and IMAP4 - then kick it when it doesn't behave that way.
The problem for a U is that you have the population of a large corp - but 80% turnover, every 3 months! That is an issue in provisioning/de-provisioning and self-service management that AD and Exchange have a tough time with. They are capable - but there's no tool, yet. If you have to pony up for the (now beta) Identity Lifecycle Manager v2, you may no longer be in competitive territory - 'tho the solution is fantastic. Accounts can be provisioned by the same process and personnel that hand out student ID and mealcards!
So, I believe that Google is nothing but a life of frustration - and in five years, when you see you've helped to build a monster that will make you wish for the good 'ol days of MS Monopoly? No thanks! Still there's the business case, and it isn't that great. The UI is good for webmail. Whoopie! No calendar / scheduling worth snot.
Yahoo! is compelling with the acquisition of Zimbra. Zimbra is amazing Ajax. Don't build your own - it is as nonstandard as you can make postfix/courier, and very intolerant of customising the backend. Instead, license Zimbra as a service, elastically as needed. Downside? Is Yahoo! still with us in 9 mos? Yang turned down Ballmers' USD 38/share, and last I looked today, they were trading at USD 11 and going down, while the CFO is looking to bypass the nominal severance minimums demanded by California for their mass bloodletting.
MS is beginning to license Exchange as a service online. It's good today, and prolly great tomorrow. Look into that - I think the real advantages happen once the number of users approaches 15K. It's an elastic service, and they do SharePoint integrated portal, too.
Re:Must be a pretty crappy university. (Score:2, Informative)
That sucks. We've got 80,000 mailboxes here running cyrus, no quota. I think management still asks us to tell people we've got 2GB quotas despite the fact we haven't had quotas in 3 or 4 years. The usage pattern has been constant over the last few years, (except for the CS prof who had a 16GB mailbox because he liked to store files in mail). The reason we've been able to not use quotas is because disk is constantly getting cheaper.
We had to put quite a bit of work into cyrus to make it scale to this size reliably, but currently we run it with only 2 FTEs. One of the best features of the system we have is we replicate the data to 2 additional sites, so even if we lose an individual server ( there are 20 in each site) we'll be back online in less than 15 minutes.
I kinda wish all the tricks we have learned would get shared, but I dunno how much has made it back out into the community.
The other place where we save cash is essentially using commodity hardware instead of a SAN.
That said, if we hit a serious bug like that, I bet there would be a push to outsource. We've hit them before with cyrus, but not since any of the alternatives were available.
Re:Ask them two questions (Score:3, Informative)
The Microsoft solution is probably Live@Edu (http://get.liveatedu.com/Education/Connect/) which does do all those things.
Re:3 choices? Ramifications? (Score:3, Informative)
You don't just have to pay, you have to pay a LOT. When we did our study we found that Exchange was cheaper then Zimbra when it came to those features.
Then when we told the salesmen that if we selected their product we would just use the open source version, he told us their free product sucked. At that point we just ruled them out and decided to go with google. It's hard to say no to free.
Re:Must be a pretty crappy university. (Score:5, Informative)
You were by far not the largest Cyrus installation. There are several installations with over 100K users. Cyrus is designed to scale horizontally (multiple small servers, each serving a portion of the users) rather than vertically (using very large servers to serve large numbers of users). The places which have the biggest problems with Cyrus tend to be those that run tens of thousands of users per server. Cyrus is far from perfect, but it can readily scale to very large installations.
Re:The most important question... (Score:3, Informative)
Yes and we decided against it as an organisation when we were looking to replace our Notes infrastructure. It costed more than Exchange did with no real benefits, so in the end we ended up with Exchange.
25 questions (Score:3, Informative)
1. How well does your email system work with non-Windows operating systems?
2. When a user is not running Windows, does he have access to full features?
3. Does every user, independent of operating system, have the ability to search his mail?
4. Does every user, independent of operating system, have the ability to download his mail in a seamless fashion without having to call IT for instructions?
5. What are the names and contact information of 5 of your best installations?
6. What are the names and contact information of 5 of your worst installations?
7. Why should we hire you?
8. Why should we hire your competitor?
9. When your system has failed in the past, what is your mean time to restoration of operation?
10. What is your worst time to restoration of operation?
11. What is your mean delivery time?
12. What is your mean delivery rate? If it is not above 99.99999% (seven 9s) provide details of the failures, and the protocols you have in place to track and correct them.
13. What is your archival plan?
14. What is your plan for retiring accounts?
15. What is your disaster recovery plan?
16. What is your tech support plan for our IT department?
17. What is your tech support plan for our users?
18. What is your training support plan for our admins?
19. How healthy is your company? Can we expect you to be in business for 5 years? 10? 20?
20. What happens to our data if you fail before our contract is up?
21. What happens to our data after our contract is up and you're still in business?
22. How recently has your system been broken in to? How long did it take you to detect it? And to respond? Is that typical of break-ins to your system?
23. What privacy and security controls to you have in place?
24. What would you do, or have you done, when faced with a subpoena for data on your users, who will be our students, faculty, and administrators?
25. What authority will you give or not give to our faculty and administrators over student data?
And that's just off the top of my head. Be sure to get the answers in writing.
Re:The most important question... (Score:4, Informative)
Exchange is awful, in terms of backup, mailing list handling, and account handling. It's also only properly available for Microsoft Outlook: nothing else provides the same set of festures. The only selling point for Exchange is its integrated calendar function, and _that_ sells a lot of software. For examples of missing features, pull up their web client and try to select all the messages on a page for deletion or transfer to another folder.
Google has been pretty stable, and knows how to make good, consistent, simple interfaces that work _anywhere_. They have some issues with the idea that all email should be saved forever, and their IMAP client does not allow you to select which mailboxes you want to see or not. This leads to a problem with the 'All Mail' group, which they really need to correct. But if you accept those limitations, it just works, for everyone, not just for Outlook users.
Yahoo seems interesting, with Zimbra available. But I agree with your stability concern for the company. Yahoo has basically lost the web search engine game, and their online services are trailing Google significantly, and they've just wasted a lot of time with at Microsoft takeover bid.
Re:The most important question... (Score:2, Informative)
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-advanced-imap-controls.html [blogspot.com]
ZImbra (Score:2, Informative)
I'm going to toss an oar in the water because I'm deploying Zimbra for my company to replace (please, put your beverage down) Exchange 5.5 on Win2k with an NT4 PDC.
Ok, now that you're done laughing...
Zimbra is, to use the words Jerry Pournelle once used to describe Vulcan (dBase I), "infuriatingly excellent".
Within the current limts of AJAX, it's web client program is very nice indeed; they have a detachable client but I haven't played with it yet.
The system runs atop a lotta buncha FOSS packages, though it brings them all along with it, which means you really want to dedicate a box/VM to running it -- this is a feature, though, not a bug. Why? Because it means that *they* worry about upstream security bugs, not you.
It does POP/SSL and IMAP/SSL, and the webclient itself can be locked to only run SSL, if you like. It has a very nice multi-domain admin control panel, the commercial version will do hot backups and connect to Outlook, and there's a Migration Wizard to pull mail, contacts and calendars out of Exchange Server.
That said, we now proceed to the infuriating part.
There are lots of things that I (having been a mail admin for 10 or 15 years, and moving about 500 real messages a day over 15 mailing lists) think it ought to do that it doesn't.
The two most fundamental are that it doesn't thread on In-Reply-To but on message title, and that it doesn't handle mailing list traffic too well. The former is Broken As Designed: there has been a bug on their (open) Bugzilla about this since v3.mumble; they just shipped 5.0.10, but no progress on the bug, no official comment, and they decline to *close* the damned bug as well -- I think that this falls in the category of "keeping all your nuts in one basket".
On the latter front, there are "next unread" and "previous unread" keys, but since they paginate their message list (for reasons that I publically assume have to do with shitty AJAX toolkits and no one disagrees with me), it would be nice, you'd think, if those went *over* the edges of pages; they don't. Since that's true, you have to read your mailing list mail backwards -- since there's no practical way to get to the *beginning* of the new traffic in the folder if you sort forwards.
There are other foibles, but perhaps business (and *maybe* college) users wouldn't notice them; they're largely the result of growing up on Mutt.
Mutt definitely sucks less than Zimbra; I haven't filed 36 bugs on Mutt.
Go into it with your eyes open, certainly, but for all that I'm personally annoyed with it, Zimbra has some good things to recommend it.
John Holder, Mike Morse, and a couple of the other staffers who frequent their forum are pretty good guys.
And in the last month, denizens thereof have rolled out 22K and 47.5K mailbox installs. So clearly it scales. Will you have to learn some things? Yes. Well it be perfect, and roll out to a college sized install with no problems whatever? Well, maybe, but I'd plan for a *few* annoyances.
Should you ignore it?
Only at your peril.
Outside hosting is, as has already been noted, extremely fraught with legal landmines.
And this month has, I think, displayed quite nicely the risks of failing to heed warnings.