THE MILLIONS OF FRESHMEN HEADING to college this semester will have to go through many changes in their daily routine as they transition into their new life on campus. Getting familiar with a shiny new .edu e-mail account won't be on some of these long to-do lists, however, since more and more higher ed institutions have started to outsource their e-mail operations to the market giants: Microsoft and Google.
E-mail outsourcing isn't a new practice in higher education. While some IHEs have been managing homegrown e-mail systems or off-the-shelf e-mail servers, others have favored a hosted solution provided by external vendors for a long time. Usually charged by the number of accounts, disk space, and bandwidth usage, the outsourced e-mail solution offers flexibility and peace of mind. But the price to pay has almost always been far higher.
Waging a war to grab and keep the eyeballs of more and more users, Microsoft--quickly followed by Google in 2006--put this e-mail outsourcing equation upside down in 2005. After the launch of Live@edu, Microsoft's suite of online-hosted communications services, including Hotmail and Office Live Workspace, what used to cost thousands of dollars or more per year became virtually free-overnight.
This paradigm shift even pushed some e-mail solutions providers serving the higher education market, such as Mirapoint, to come up with attractive new options. Last December, the company that provides appliance-based comprehensive messaging solutions to more than 200 institutions around the world counterattacked with an offer designed to grab the attention of e-mail outsourcing proponents. Mirapoint announced its plan to offer free student email licenses to higher ed institutions so that they can take advantage of free e-mail accounts for students without losing control of the institution's own user base.
Earlier versions of Microsoft and Google e-mail services were designed with the same type of ads served on any regular Gmail or Hotmail e-mail accounts. However, this setting was quickly waived for students by both companies. Even though both Microsoft and Google have shown a strong commitment to education, the move to remove ads from free student accounts had nothing to do with altruism. It simply made sense for the business.
"We removed the ads at the request of our customers," says Jeff Keltner, a Google Apps for Edu product manager. Google looks at this service as a way to grow its user base and an investment that will pay off in the long term.
"Our goal is to introduce students to the service, have them fall in love with it, and use it for life. ... We turn webmail banner ads on when students graduate and become alumni," says Bruce Gabrielle, Microsoft Live@edu senior product manager.
Today, Microsoft and Google report thousands of colleges, universities, and K-12 schools enrolled in their respective programs around the world. Both have been hard at work to convince even more institutions to adopt their free services.
In March 2005, South Dakota State University was among the first five institutions retained for the beta test of Live@edu. The others: Ball State University (Ind.), Indiana University Alumni Association, The University of Texas-Pan American, and Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland. "We had a mainframe-based system that only about 15 percent of the students actually used," says Michael Adelaine, CIO at South Dakota State. The institution needed a vehicle to communicate with more than just a fraction of its student population. Most students were using Hotmail as their personal primary e-mail service. The move to Live@edu was natural, especially since Google Apps for Edu wasn't part of the picture at that time. From 1,000 e-mail accounts in 2005 to 12,000 now, South Dakota State University has come a long way and reached a student e-mail usage rate of almost 80 percent. Mission accomplished.
Looking for new approaches to technology in order to support its growth goals, Arizona State University, under CTO Adrian Sannier's lead, had decided to get out of businesses not core to its mission when discussions started with Google in October 2006. "ASU representatives met with Google to discuss the possibility of deploying the Google Apps for Edu suite to the ASU community," recalls Sannier. Two weeks later, ASU had deployed its first application, Gmail for ASU, to replace ASU's homegrown student e-mail system.
The day Arizona State
announced the new service
in 2006, students converted
their e-mail accounts to Gmail
for ASU at the rate of 300
per hour. The university's 10-
day implementation has been
used by e-mail outsourcing
proponents ever since.
