Rumors have been floating around campus about a change from IBM's Lotus Notes e-mail system to the more high tech Google mail (Gmail) accounts. Lotus Notes users have been complaining of not having enough storage, so UDit has decided to look into a new e-mail system. "We feel that offering students an increase in storage is advantageous for the students," said Susan McCabe, assistant CIO, financial and administrative operations and director of systems integration. The benefits of switching will ultimately be the maximized mail storage that Gmail offers to users. The idea is still fresh, and there are still questions unanswered about the switch.
With Lotus Notes appearing to cause more problems than the number of e-mails it can hold, almost 2,500 of the 13,750 undergraduate students have begun to forward the e-mails sent to their student accounts to other e-mail servers such as Yahoo and Gmail. Susan McCabe, assistant CIO and director of Systems Integration, said there are multiple reasons 20 percent of students forward their Lotus Notes e-mails. One reason could be the limited space Lotus Notes provides, leaving many students' inboxes full and unable to accept new e-mails.
Along with e-mail, a Lotus account provides you with access to all of the other information and applications that reside on our Lotus servers. This information includes threaded discussions for courses, libraries filled with important office or course-related documents, reservation systems for conference rooms and many other important applications. In addition, SameTime, a tool for instant messaging, supports immediate communication with colleagues through text messaging, audio and video, or full collaborative meetings.
The university should solicit student input. We use Lotus Domino/Notes for student e-mail, with mailbox sizes adequate for the year 2001 and an informal poll showing at least 80 percent student disapproval of the selection. Other universities have chosen gmail; Google provides it for free to universities, with massive mailboxes, seamless iPhone/Blackberry compatibility and a much better user experience. It took how long to stop forcing Tangents on students, overpriced, sub-standard laptops which also endured glaring disapproval?
Providing e-mail for life for students has a lot of storage and licensing implications, that make it almost impossible to address with an "in house" solution. It is like adding a couple of thousand users every year, without ever removing any. Although I certainly do like the idea of all that hardware and storage at my disposal, I'm not sure the people who are responsible for power and cooling in our data center would agree. The other somewhat interesting problem that e-mail for life brings up, is user names and e-mail addresses. As you can imagine we quickly run out of first.last@
While certain things like single copy template, compression for design and attachments, and DAOS help with space requirements, a lot of students use their e-mail like a bottomless filing cabinet. The couple of hundred megabytes of space we give them often times is not enough for how they want to use their mail
. . . if you name any given device or client someone somewhere on campus probably has one. The majority of [the] students now use Domino web access (some call it iNotes), which has made upgrades a lot easier. Since students own their own computers, we cannot really "force" them to upgrade [to the latest version of Notes]. It's not so much that we could not do it technically, but it would be very unpopular. We also run IMAP and POP on our servers, and have an SMTP server, that requires authentication, to support all the other devices and clients that people want. We try to help out with as many different ones as possible, but there are a lot out there.
We have a couple thousand employees (faculty and staff), but by far our largest population of users are the students. Which sometimes makes things interesting, compared to the corporate world. Lots of people want to do their own thing, run their own client or device, and we try to be as accommodating as possible. If they are happy with web access, great. If they want to install the [Notes] client we are okay with that, too. If they want to run Thunderbird, Outlook Express, an iPhone or Droid, we try to help out as much as possible.
[Most] students come [to campus] with an existing e-mail address. They already have a Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo address that they have been using for years and they want to continue using it. Because of this, we let them forward their Lotus Notes accounts to that address, if they want to. We do not want to be in the business of keeping track of everyone's external email address. What we do for these requests is to send to their Lotus Notes account and provide the student with the ability to forward their mail to any address they want.
For a lot of universities, the email systems that they currently run are pretty outdated, with just POP and SMTP, maybe IMAP, and some sort of web access. With an environment like that, the move to something like Gmail or Live@edu is, I think, a lot easier. The university knows that it has to do something; They invest money in their old system and make it better, they invest money in a move to Lotus Notes/Domino or Outlook/Exchange, or they look at something cloud based. Most of the places I know have been in that situation have gone the cloud based route. Thinking about moving to the cloud from something like Lotus Notes/Domino (even Outlook/Exchange) is a lot tougher in my opinion. A cloud based solution does offer more space and some other new things, but there are trade-offs. Always pros and cons for whichever system you pick.
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