UNL is strongly considering outsourcing student email to one of two different vendors: either Google or Microsoft. Unfortunately I'm going to miss the Microsoft presentations tomorrow because I'm running a fever, but I wanted to post some notes/thoughts from the Google presentations.
From the Identity Management perspective, Google offers out of the box support for account generation & authentication using our choice of existing systems. Authentication would probably use the CAS that we're rolling out for a some other services. Account generation would be fed by our LDAP. Active students would have an entirely ad-free experience, based on the status that we could feed to them. Alumni (or other "affiliated but non-active" users would have ads turned on for them). Support for privacy-flag opt-out for FERPA regulations is coming within the next 6 months. Until that time, we could just turn off "shared contacts." End-user support would come from local help-desk with 24/7 escalation of issues to Google. Documentation for support desks is in place, and more detailed admin tools like checking mail logs for delivery status are currently in development.
From the Academic Technology standpoint, one of the best core points is browser support for not only Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux (IE, Firefox, and Safari), but also very strong existing support for a broad range of mobile devices. Google indicates that they see a strong mobile experience as a critical strategy for them. Email system supports a broad range of clients and protocols including HTTP, POP, IMAP, and several mobile-focused methods. Pretty seamless workflow that can be entirely web-based from email to calendar (take a look at an OSCELOT open-source project that would allow users to subscribe to a Blackboard-based calendar from Google Calendar) to open-standard (Jabber, XMPP) based chat, to document creation including text and spreadsheet. Everything is strongly web-based and collaboration-focused. Road-map wise, look for Wiki and video-conferencing coming soon. We would need to look at what integrations ASU and others have already done between Google Apps and Blackboard, as well as the API's to see what else we can do. Features strong support for mail routing and whitelisting (so that we can be sure that mail from Bb gets through).
Very platform-agnostic. Those are the bits are are coming to the surface, but I'm sure that I'm leaving a lot out - fever and all. Jeff Keltner (the presenter from Google) has canned one of his presentations from a while ago, which I'll embed below. The presentation below is old enough to leave out things like 6GB of mail, and IMAP support for email.
No comments:
Post a Comment