Location : Cleveland, OH
In a "Letter to the Editor," published in the University of Dayton's student newspaper, writer Tim Burke airs a few of his issues with the student body and the university. Among the issues, he writes:
Colleges and universities are in, I think, a unique position. Unlike the corporate world, they really have two sets of messaging users. First are the faculty and staff. These users are similar to users in the corporate environment; a few adds and deletes over the course of a year, university IT staff controls the desktop, and the IT department provides them with university resources - BlackBerry's, desktop and notebook computers, and the like. Probably controlled much like you would see in the corporate world. The second group is much, much larger - the students. They bring a host of challenges to the IT infrastructure and those that manage it. First, they are usually provided "e-mail addresses for life." Imagine that, hundreds, if not thousands of new e-mail addresses to add every year and never deleting one. With that comes some interesting problems; :storage, licensing, and management, among others.
Looking at the students, and the unique issues they pose, I asked someone that supports a university messaging environment for some thoughts on this.
Storage and licensing implications would be a huge consideration. While you could probably impose a quota, the number would have to be at least 5-10GB, to compete with free services. And with that comes the administration of operating system, hardware, and application upgrades. Not to mention the yearly increase in disk requirements. To alleviate some of those issues, I asked about, for example, DAOS.
.
These are people that are quite familiar with current free services and the storage space that they are afforded. Deleting mail, and attachments, probably never enters their mind. If the university is using Lotus products, things like design and document compression and DAOS are new features. Imagine upgrading thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of mail files to take advantage of the new features in your messaging environment.
And then we get to mobile devices and a plethora of e-mail clients. While the IT staff has control of the faculty and staff devices, usually providing access through a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, that is not true of the students.
.
In the corporate world, we help ourselves by limiting the devices that can connect to our systems. That is not the case in colleges and universities. By providing IMAP and POP, they get 100% of the population, but there will be those that want synchronization with their calendars and contacts. Lotus Traveler helps, but it doesn't cover the all of the devices that the university will need to support and asking students to purchase a 3rd party application to get those features may be out of the question.
One "nice" thing about the messaging staff at colleges and universities - you will see and try to support every device known to man. Some, you will be brand new, others, not so much. You will have to attempt to get them all working with your environment.
The students all arrive at campus with existing e-mail addresses, which also puts a bit of a burden on the environment, but for the most part, IT gives the students an option.
Final thoughts?
So, back to Tim's Letter to the Editor. I believe that the university does know about low mail quota's. a "better user experience," and integration with today's smartphones. However, I don't think that Tim understands "limited resources;" time, budget (which, I am sure at the university level, are always being reduced), people. I think that Tim will see a move from his current on-premisis mail system (Lotus Notes and Domino) to the cloud (probably) for the student body. And, he may see it happen before he graduates. However, I also think that his university's IT staff support issues will not go away - they will continually be challenged by the incoming freshman class' needs and to work with the messaging provider to address an ever expanding range of devices and clients.
While IBM Lotus loses some licenses, perhaps the removal of the student body from the university messaging system will free up resources that would allow the IT staff to provide a "better user experience" to the faculty and staff; Notes and Domino 8.5.1, widgets, Sametime, and more. Or, maybe for the education market, IBM Lotus provides a service similar to Gmail and Live@edu, and adding instant messaging, collaboration and productivity tools, and more to the offering. Whatever happens, the messaging issues facing colleges and universities are more challenging and complex, I think, than you see in the corporate environment.
Link: The Flyer News: Letter to the Editor: Lack of student body's opinion is troublesome, needs to change
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?
Colleges and universities are in, I think, a unique position. Unlike the corporate world, they really have two sets of messaging users. First are the faculty and staff. These users are similar to users in the corporate environment; a few adds and deletes over the course of a year, university IT staff controls the desktop, and the IT department provides them with university resources - BlackBerry's, desktop and notebook computers, and the like. Probably controlled much like you would see in the corporate world. The second group is much, much larger - the students. They bring a host of challenges to the IT infrastructure and those that manage it. First, they are usually provided "e-mail addresses for life." Imagine that, hundreds, if not thousands of new e-mail addresses to add every year and never deleting one. With that comes some interesting problems; :storage, licensing, and management, among others.
Looking at the students, and the unique issues they pose, I asked someone that supports a university messaging environment for some thoughts on this.
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@
Storage and licensing implications would be a huge consideration. While you could probably impose a quota, the number would have to be at least 5-10GB, to compete with free services. And with that comes the administration of operating system, hardware, and application upgrades. Not to mention the yearly increase in disk requirements. To alleviate some of those issues, I asked about, for example, DAOS.
.
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
These are people that are quite familiar with current free services and the storage space that they are afforded. Deleting mail, and attachments, probably never enters their mind. If the university is using Lotus products, things like design and document compression and DAOS are new features. Imagine upgrading thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of mail files to take advantage of the new features in your messaging environment.
And then we get to mobile devices and a plethora of e-mail clients. While the IT staff has control of the faculty and staff devices, usually providing access through a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, that is not true of the students.
.
. . . 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.
In the corporate world, we help ourselves by limiting the devices that can connect to our systems. That is not the case in colleges and universities. By providing IMAP and POP, they get 100% of the population, but there will be those that want synchronization with their calendars and contacts. Lotus Traveler helps, but it doesn't cover the all of the devices that the university will need to support and asking students to purchase a 3rd party application to get those features may be out of the question.
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.
One "nice" thing about the messaging staff at colleges and universities - you will see and try to support every device known to man. Some, you will be brand new, others, not so much. You will have to attempt to get them all working with your environment.
The students all arrive at campus with existing e-mail addresses, which also puts a bit of a burden on the environment, but for the most part, IT gives the students an option.
[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.
Final thoughts?
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.
So, back to Tim's Letter to the Editor. I believe that the university does know about low mail quota's. a "better user experience," and integration with today's smartphones. However, I don't think that Tim understands "limited resources;" time, budget (which, I am sure at the university level, are always being reduced), people. I think that Tim will see a move from his current on-premisis mail system (Lotus Notes and Domino) to the cloud (probably) for the student body. And, he may see it happen before he graduates. However, I also think that his university's IT staff support issues will not go away - they will continually be challenged by the incoming freshman class' needs and to work with the messaging provider to address an ever expanding range of devices and clients.
While IBM Lotus loses some licenses, perhaps the removal of the student body from the university messaging system will free up resources that would allow the IT staff to provide a "better user experience" to the faculty and staff; Notes and Domino 8.5.1, widgets, Sametime, and more. Or, maybe for the education market, IBM Lotus provides a service similar to Gmail and Live@edu, and adding instant messaging, collaboration and productivity tools, and more to the offering. Whatever happens, the messaging issues facing colleges and universities are more challenging and complex, I think, than you see in the corporate environment.
Link: The Flyer News: Letter to the Editor: Lack of student body's opinion is troublesome, needs to change
Powered By : Domino
BlogSphere V1.3.1
Join The WebLog Revolution at BlogSphere.net