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?"
The most important question... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The most important question... (Score:5, Funny)
Three choices? (Score:3, Funny)
Three vendors? You must be new here; everyone else on this board only sees two! :D
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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
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Honestly, the ability to tie Exchange into your PBX seamlessly and reply to email from your phone, and check your voicemails from your email is pretty nifty.
That being said, Zimbra is damned impressive.
Gmail would be the simplest solution.
Creighton University just switched to it.
Re:The most important question... (Score:4, Insightful)
tie Exchange into your PBX(...) pretty nifty
and useless... its a pretty thing to show off... but then you realise that
only 0.1% of the users might have use it and even then in extreme cases...
its complex solution that is just a money/work hole, that management
like to brag to friends ("yeh, i can listen to my emails!!"), although
they only used it to twice and dont know what to do with it
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Checking voicemail from email or replying to email from your phone are *not* features that you need Exchange to get. They aren't even things Exchange did first or particularly well. It's just a popular solution that other vendors (like PBX providers) advertise compatibility with, nothing more, nothing less.
And Exchange is a nasty solution if you're not using an MS OS -- the IMAP client on your phone won't work unless someone enables it. Even if they enable IMAP doesn't work terribly well when mixed with MAP
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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.
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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.
Let's see...Zimbra is the best alternative to Exchange. Yahoo owns Zimbra. Microsoft will soon own Yahoo.
Shit.
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.
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As far as your Google IMAP problem, it can be solved by using a desktop email program such as Thunderbird, Evolution or even, dare I say it, Outlook. Oh, wait, on LifeHacker now I see that Google has just rolled out IMAP folder selection! That problem's solved now.
What we do is have a Google Apps account with mail, calendar, and docs, and integrate with a company Drupal site (except mail. it was very simple). Works like a charm. There was something featured on Slashdot over th
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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.
DO. NOT. LIE.
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?
I guess this pretty much explains your bias towards MS...
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.
Now that has really made me laugh.
3 choices? Ramifications? (Score:2, Insightful)
Google: least harm
microsoft: most lock-in
Yahoo!: possible lock-in
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Yahoo!: Possibly won't be available next semester.
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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:3 choices? Ramifications? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh god... not Sharepoint. Seriously the worst fucking system on the planet for it's intended purpose. I've seen a whole Sharepoint system rendered useless purely from some tool techie connecting with an updated version of Office. The entries become useless after that unless you upgrade the whole network to the latest version of MS Office.
As for Zimbra, never used it, but it sounds like a nice system. I'd be going between that and Google (I already run a domain bar the web presence via Google docs).
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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.
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I dont understand your rational..
google least harm ? they take all the email off site and you cant control anything and they have downtime (everyone does but least its in your control...) : Blame it on google
microsoft ? most lock in ? there are loads of tools to get data out of the exchange system live same problem as gmail : exchange is expensive
yahoo : hosted there may be a lock in to standards... zimbra best solution out of these what stanford went with : again expensive for zimbra clients
Re:3 choices? Ramifications? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am fond of Google-based solutions, but I think it bears noting that both Gmail and Google Docs are still tagged as "beta" by Google. I don't know if it's because they have impossibly high standard for a release, or because the "beta" flag indemnifies them, but at the end of the day, you'd still be hitching your star on something that the vendor has technically described as not completely ready for prime-time.
Re:3 choices? Ramifications? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google least lock-in? No way - they'll own your calendars, your email accounts, your social networking, your website if you let them... Try shifting your online identity away from Google once you've been with them for a bit. I'm still waiting for the day someone loses their job because their Gmail account is suspended and the person has all their work stuff run through Google. I see some businesses trusting all their data to Google's external servers sometimes! And if the institution is considering Google, they need to ask serious questions about where its hosted, privacy and marketing, etc.
Shifting from one solution to another will always be a substantial piece of work, but if you own the data, it's under your control, it's going to be more viable than a setup where you don't.
Missing option: (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Missing option: (Score:5, Interesting)
Google, because then your students and teachers can use Google Apps instead of whatever they're using now to submit and share documents.
Re:Missing option: (Score:5, Informative)
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Wouldn't be a slashvertisement, but maybe it's a gagvertisement.
If Possible (Score:2, Insightful)
We use ... (Score:3, Interesting)
We use a combination of Squirrelmail and some homebrew imap and smtp servers, which ultimately are going to be tied in to a Shibboleth SSO solution.
Most of our systems are homebrew and rely on cron jobs to update the AD (or the mysql db with an AD dump .. i'm not sure which way round it goes these days)
If you've always used out of the box software then outsourcing your services is probably the best idea, even if it would be more cost-effective to hire a couple of beardy unwashed hackers for a few months to put something together and keep one on for long term support.
Specific questions (Score:5, Insightful)
Find out which one has the least lock-in (Score:3, Insightful)
You may end up w/ an in-house system.
Let your CS dept run it.
Re:Find out which one has the least lock-in (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Find out which one has the least lock-in (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't. The CS department is interested in education and research. They may come up with an innovative solution and write a few papers about it - then abandon it, leaving it with poor documentation, a bad interface, hundreds of bugs, and idiosyncratic and non-standard elements.
IT is not CS. IT is a service.CS is a discipline. Asking the CS department to run the academic IT systems is like asking the English department to run the library. It's a non-starter.
Re:Find out which one has the least lock-in (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll agree with one caveat: CS will do THEIR OWN IT very right - they often just don't feel like meddling with everyone else's.
For example, I went to Clemson University(graduated 2003), with a unique perspective - I majored in CS but worked as a student worker for the IT department of the College of Business and Behavioral Sciences. Our IT department coordinated with the overall campus IT to deliver a workable network for the students and regular faculty - Novell Netware on the backend with all Windows machines on the frontend. Microsoft Office, , MatLAB, etc. All stuff that your average home user might want because it's what they knew, and what worked easiest with the outside world. All of which was the opposite of what the CS department wants, which is typically, as mentioned, research tools.
So in my case the CS department effectively sectioned itself off entirely. Solaris machines on the desktop and the backend with an available Oracle server, Sun's compilers (gcc was installed too but wasn't the default compiler), etc. They even maintained their own separate email system for all CS majors and faculty (Postfix based - everyone had shell accounts that they could access via SSH remotely and could check their mail via pine, mutt, or any other of many installed programs). Now they too had their own dedicated staff to maintain this network (though several key members of that staff also taught a few classes, but usually on things like Intro to Unix or Network Administration rather than the more abstract classes), but it was all internally maintained.
Basically my point is that even though the CS department probably isn't interested in doing IT for the whole campus, a lot of times they'll maintain their own because a) a "mainstream" IT department isn't going to provide the type of environment they need, and b) they, and usually their students, are adaptable enough that they can stray off the beaten path quite a bit without much trouble. And honestly, though I'd say it was probably more a matter of the software they used rather than their staff competence, I'll say that the CS systems that I used virtually never gave even a hint of trouble. It was a well oiled machine. The Windows machines on the main network weren't nearly as well behaved.
a legacy mail system which can no longer fit their (Score:2, Funny)
...a legacy mail system which can no longer fit their needs.
I can see where this is going already. Enjoy your Exchange server farm.
Protip: Don't let your IT department work with anything sharp. That way they can't kill themselves.
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You know, any IT professional who needs sharp objects to commit suicide is sadly underqualified. "Down, Not Across" might be the ASR Mantra, but where's the fun in that? Oozing over a few things. Hell, if you've got super-sized UPSen and diesel back-up generators and a whole lot of cables and a leatherman I'm sure you can find more exciting ways to de-install both yourself and Exchange.
Hell, if it came down to
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
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Dear Mr. Jones:
These e-mail services will all be provided to you on the cloud. You don't need to back up any data since it will be maintained on at least 2 commodity servers in different data centers. You won't be vulnerable to worms through our mail apps run only in your browser under javascript, and it's not complex enough to corrupt. You won't need a log, as no data will ever be purged, merely "deleted".
The sending policy is simple... You log into the server and send your mail. You are a college kid, you
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Re:what happens if... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Agreed outside of saving the mail logs and bodies. This is a college, not a corporation. At mine, they preferred to log nothing to avoid getting pulled into legal disputes. AFAIK, it isn't required by law, so it's all headaches for no gain on their part.
This argument won't hold water for long. 2 reasons:
1. The university is most likely also a corporation (or even more likely a set of may corps). The set of rules the are subject to are WAY to broad (state, federal, union, blah blah blah) to be summarized into a single line document retention policy ("log nothing to avoid getting pulled into legal disputes")
2. Choosing not to archive on an ongoing basis doesn't remove the need to have a "legal hold" when an organization learns about pending litigation. Being
how easy to get off ? (Score:2)
I completely agree !
system migration and the ability to get at data in a standard way i VERY important
regards
John Jones
Why aren't you running it yourselves? (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for a small-ish university in Canada and we run our own mail systems. With the proper software and expertise it's not that difficult to do.
Is there some reason that you're looking at external vendors? Not enough staff? Not enough internal expertise with email? Cost? Something else?
If you did decide to host it yourself, you could go the traditional route with a Unix-based mailserver, and something like Horde's IMP for Webmail. Or you could look at something like Zimbra, which has all your mail basics plus extra goodness like calendaring built-in.
As for who I would go with from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft - as a former sysadmin I would avoid Microsoft. This isn't because I'm some kind of Unix bigot - it's because in my experience they tend to oversell the capabilities of their products ... the true limitations of which you discover after the deal has been signed.
That may have just been the reps we had back in Ottawa, but YMMV.
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Don't use Yahoo Mail (Score:2)
I also have mail
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Also, one thing I forgot to mention in my original post. The time it takes to access an email is proportional to the number of messages in the current folder. And I have found that the search function doesn't include any new emails that arent at least a day old.
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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
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.
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yes I have to agree legal and the ability to control your own world
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Which service integrates best? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would be be asking either of these rep's is what service integrates best with your existing student directory service(AD, OpenLDAP eDirectory etc), and how do they go about managing mass account creation, recipient policies, group membership.
Its one thing to bring in a new mail service, but ongoing management and maintenance of users and mailboxes, it and how it interacts with other internal systems would be the most important thing to me from an administrative point of view.
Re:Which service integrates best? (Score:5, Funny)
This sounds so crazy. Mass account creation? Directory services?
Back in MY day, if you wanted a school email account, you went to the lab underneath the library and tried to get the alpha geek's attention. If he found your manner pleasing, and if your papers were in order, you might get a VAX account.
Or, he might turn you into a newt. You took your chances.
It's kind of sad today, now that the magic is gone.
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.
Student and Faculty Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
I would be concerned about the privacy implications of using Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, or GMail for your student and faculty email. Now, granted, a lot of college students will be using one of those three for their personal email accounts *anyhow*, but for faculty in particular, and even some students, there could be some real downsides to using a third-party email provider.
For example, I don't know what Uni you're from, but a lot of Universities have faculty and students who are involved in research which might be of a nature where it might not be good to have them sending emails through a third-party. For example, professors and/or students working on Defense dept, Energy department, or CIA/NSA research (although, it might be that in such a situation, they would be using a more secure email system run by the government agency they are collaborating with, instead of the University email, anyhow, so maybe that's not such a concern).
Still, in general, I don't like the privacy implications of using Yahoo, Microsoft, or GMail for university email systems.
You might ask the representatives what guarantees of privacy they are willing to make to the University and it's students, faculty, and staff. I think I would hold them to a higher standard than what the normal Yahoo, MSN, or Gmail privacy statements offer.
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very true i would hope that yahoo is pushing zimbra and microsoft exchange for exactly these reasons !
What Privacy? (Score:2)
Basically, you're saying you can't trust an outside email provider to respect your privacy. If that's true, who do you trust? Your organization's own IT department? That's foolish. If you've followed the news at all, you've seen a lot of news stories about in-house IT providers failing to support their user's privacy, either because of sloppy security practices or actual snooping by IT employees.
Unless you maintain your own email server, you have to trust somebody not to look into your mailbox. If you have
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
Wrong question -- need good network file system (Score:2, Insightful)
Think Collaboration - (Score:2, Insightful)
Calendaring? Integration? (Score:2)
99% Chance you should go with MS due to the integration requirement and familiarity people have with MS stuff. If you're dead set against being locked down to MS stuff though (often policy driven), it might not be doable unless you can get it in writing, on video, and with a pinky promise.
Google probably has some fun cloudy online app ideas, but they probably violate all sorts of policies about access to data, storage of confidential data, etc.
Yahoo? Is this like when you invite the ugly girl/boy to go wi
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I'm assuming he meant an EXISTING system.
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Novell Groupwise with LDAP (Score:3, Insightful)
You need a professional IT staff with real experience with LDAP and Novell Groupwise. If you are a big university, don't fuck around with Exchange. Universities have serious IT Needs and require elite administrators.
Be very careful about intellectual property rights (Score:5, Insightful)
I looked over a contract between Google and a large university and found it to be very dangerous to the intellectual property rights of the university and to the privacy rights of students, faculty, and staff.
For example, because email is being disclosed to a third party, such as Google, it could affect the dates of disclosure (publication) of information and could, thus, cause a patent application to fail because of an excessive time lapse between publication and the application. It is necessary to bring the provider into the tent of protection so that patent rights are not harmed.
And in these days of litigation, consider who will get subpoenas, the university or the provider, and who will get notice in time to go to court to contest the delivery of the materials.
The terms in some of these contracts make the provider the copyright owner, or at least give a perpetual non-revocable license to the provider, even beyond the lifetime of the agreement. That can lead to some rather unhappy faculty who find that their publications, and their notes and discussions, have been licensed away, forever.
Also consider whether the university can get the email back at the end of the contract. There is a good chance that it will not be able to do so.
And consider whether you think it is a good idea for students, who tend to experiment with life's options, to begin to build a lifelong dossier that contains their university life emails.
The number of issues of this type is huge and most university lawyers are either not equipped to comprehend them or don't care to do so.
Most people I know who have deeply considered these things tend to find it a really bad idea to outsource university email without very, very strong contractual protections that think through the issues of now and the issues that might arise in the future, particularly when the university wants to terminate the agreement or move to another provider.
Phone Calls? (Score:2)
For example, because email is being disclosed to a third party, such as Google, it could affect the dates of disclosure (publication) of information and could, thus, cause a patent application to fail because of an excessive time lapse between publication and the application. It is necessary to bring the provider into the tent of protection so that patent rights are not harmed.
Are there no telephone precedents for this?
Ask how their system complies with FERPA. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some questions I'd ask: (Score:2)
Use Blackboard (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Use Blackboard (Score:4, Insightful)
Ask them two questions (Score:4, Insightful)
Does your service support encrypted protocols?
Does your service support a standards based access for sending and receiving email (IMAP, POP3, SMTP)?
Hint: only GMail supports these two crucial features.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The Microsoft solution is probably Live@Edu (http://get.liveatedu.com/Education/Connect/) which does do all those things.
Get phone support with Google (Score:4, Interesting)
If you go with Google, make sure their proposal has phone support for administrative accounts. Their service is wonderful, their support wanks. And I'd stand on that. No support, no deal. Which ever one you go with, make sure you have an exit strategy in writing. How they're going to help you transition, including message migration, if the relationship sours. I expect Google to have a good option there, don't know about the other two.
Half your students are probably already using Gmail anyway.
Browser compatibility (Score:2)
What browsers and operating systems are supported for webmail? Keep in mind that even if the university has a standard browser, people will be accessing their mail from elsewhere (home, conferences, etc.). Saying "Just use IE" is not acceptable.
Is there a way to access mail using encrypted POP or IMAP. POP or IMAP is essential because college users are incredibly mobile. Constant connectivity cannot be assumed. On a related note, how do users check mail from cell phones?
When users access mail from a br
Yahoo (Score:2)
Ask them how they could possibly think that changing words (as opposed to script tags) in emails was a good idea:
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-944315.html [cnet.com]
It's an old story, but it's the same company.
Cross-platform support (Score:2)
Will the client side work (well) on a variety of platforms?
What are the back-end requirements? Do they lock you into a particular vendor, architecture, OS?
Is there support for handheld devices? For a variety of operating systems? On cheap phones or only (expensive) smart phones?
Support is important, but the relative need for support is also important. What have user's experiences been for these products?
Ask about interoperability (Score:2)
At work I have nothing but trouble trying to reliably use our Exchange server with Linux for calendar support.
Ahhh... (Score:2)
The joys of anonymous cowards. Hey, Can support means "with the right person and talent" not "If the idiot programmers did it right." More often than not it's the end-user that has to make workarounds for getting a product to do what they want it to do.
And for the poor guy working for International Paper - boohoo. Go back East of the Mississippi where you belong. I left you idiots behind for a more reasonable and less corrupt state out West.
We went google (Score:4, Interesting)
I work at a mid-sized community college. We are in the process of migrating our calendars, chat, and email to google (from iplanet/luminous). So far it is very promising and best of all basically free.
Not to mention our servers no longer get hit with incoming spam and we do not need to maintain a antivirus server to scan incoming email. Going exchange was way overboard cost wise, and going with zimbra proved to be MORE costly then exchange (go figure). Our requirements were to be able to use outlook for people who want to, have a great web UI, be usable from pda's, iphones, and other smart devices, and integrate well with our current web portal. Google met all those goals with easy.
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.
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Missing the point - can save money (Score:5, Insightful)
The university in question will NOT be dumping a load of cash on this, and in fact will probably be saving some. Microsoft. Yahoo and Google all provide this free of charge to Universities - in exchange for getting their stuff and services used by a new bunch of students each and every year, some of whom will continue to use the service even after they graduate. In some ways the students are a commodity, who are being traded to the external provider in exchange for an externally-hosted service.
Senior management may not care about lock-in - they'll be looking at what they can offer students for the least amount of money. If it all works on paper over the next three to five years they may not care about anything else.
Sure, you need to pay someone to provision the accounts, but you don't have a box that sucks down power to run and cool and that needs to be patched and backed up. You have someone else to yell at if things break, too.
My workplace outsourced student mail to one of the larger players, over my initial objections, but I have to admit that overall it seems to be working out quite well.
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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:Horde (Score:5, Interesting)
I work at the ITEE school at my uni, and our tech section was running Horde for our email server. It was superb. Alas, orders came from above that they wished to centralise the email servers and we got stuck on Exchange. It's crap compared to what we had. The web client is rubbish, and the mail server is dog slow.
I'd go with the above suggestion if you have the choice. Second choice, I'd probably recommend Google.
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How cooperative will they be should you need to investigate student misconduct? (i.e. cheating, plagiarism, etc.)
This does not include criminal matters since that is up to law enforcement to deal with.
How will usernames be set up? Do you get to define the pattern or can the students use any name they want?
Is it easy to access your service from mobile devices? (I use Yahoo and it works fine from my Centro, but I have to pay for premium service)
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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 g
Re:Must be a pretty crappy university. (Score:5, Interesting)
Until this fall, our university was maintaining one of, if not the largest, Cyrus [cmu.edu] mail system in the world. Over 50,000 mailboxes generating an average of 4,000,000 transactions a day (peaking at 5,000,000), hosted on a cluster of SunFire servers and StorEdge/StorageTek SAN. In-house, open-source...sounds great, right?
This year we estimated the cost of increasing our default inbox quota from a paltry 60 MB to 1 GB (a long-overdue upgrade). The total came in at about US$500,000, which is fiscally untenable at this point.
Then we were hit by a previously unknown ZFS bug that crippled mail delivery for almost a week while we worked with Carnegie Mellon, Sun and consultants trying to figure out why our system wasn't scaling properly.
We realized that sometimes outsourcing is the best alternative, no matter what in-house resources or requirements exist.
We just launched Google-hosted email for all students, which is projected to save $250,000 annually (or more if TCO is considered).
It was fun being the guinea-pig for scaling up Cyrus, but by partnering with Google we can deliver more reliable, larger inboxes and save money instead of spending it. DIY "let the CS department handle it" philosophies are great, but not always the best plan. Even for email, outsourcing can sometimes be the best option, not a cop out.
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.
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Half a mil ? Really ? Let's see.
50,000 mailboxes, 1 GB each, let's overestimate and multiply this by 4 (2x for raid mirroring, 2x for a disk-based backup on a raid mirror), so you need about 200 TB of raw storage. 192 TB can be provided by 4 Thumpers (Sun Fire x4500, 4 rack units) with 48 1-TB disks each (pretty soon Sun will offer 1.5-TB disks), and the 4 of them fit in only 16 rack units.
Assuming you are getting ripped off by Sun, let's overestimate again and say you pay $1200/TB (raw disks are 10 TI
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Yes it is reasonable to run 4 Thumpers with 1-TB drives. Read the OpenSolaris ZFS mailing list, some people are doing just that.
You are wrong when you say "the number of concurrent users queued up against reads & writes on a given spindle goes way up". Previous situation: 1666 mailbox/drive (60 MB quota, assuming 100-GB drives). With 4 Thumpers: 1000 mailbox/drive (1 GB quota, 1-TB drives). That's actually lower !
Buying/configuring/administering 4 Thumpers for 5 years probably cost $10-20k in peopl
Re:Must be a pretty crappy university. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds more like you were a guinea-pig for ZFS, which maybe wasn't the super best choice for a filesystem to host Cyrus. I'm sure everyone else who now can use Cyrus with ZFS thanks you, but it definitely wasn't the most cluefull move. But hey, ZFS is neat-o, I can understand the attraction.
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> I would be sure to ask what the process is to migrate your existing email infrastructure
> over the new vendors' respective systems.
Sure, but it's much more important to ask what the process is to migrate away from the new vendors' systems.
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Zimbra works very well, if your not looking to outsource. (ask the Yahoo guys about it)
It can be run as a domain controller itself using OpenLDAP and Samba to do account authentication, and there are modules in Zimbra to allow it to do that.. So while you are replacing your mail server you can take the PDC out with it. :p
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