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From the issue dated January 11, 2008 Colleges Get Out of E-Mail Business

By DAN CARNEVALE

Frantic troubleshooting by an overworked staff versus someone else fixing problems smoothly. A sliver of server space per person versus a five-gigabyte chunk. Half a million dollars versus free.

That's what colleges are faced with as they decide whether to continue running their own e-mail services or outsource them to a professional service like Google Apps Education Edition or Microsoft Live@edu.

It seems like a no-brainer. More than 1,000 colleges have signed up with those two companies because, college administrators say, it makes sense to let professionals take over. After all, colleges are educational institutions, not technology enterprises. With heavyweights like Google and Microsoft offering their already-popular services to colleges for free, the officials figure this is one sweet deal.

"It has been one of those rare opportunities where there are a lot of upsides and no downsides," says Kevin Roberts, chief information officer at Abilene Christian University, which recently let Google take over its e-mail. "It's been a great deal for us."

Many colleges decided to outsource their e-mail after pressure from students who already used Gmail or Hotmail on their own and persuaded administrators to go with one or the other.

But not everyone has jumped on the outsourcing bandwagon, and others are looking carefully before they leap. Information-technology administrators worry whether the commercial enterprises will protect students' privacy. Colleges have legal obligations to do so, but companies are bound largely by their stated privacy policies, which can be changed. And the companies plainly say they want the college market because it translates into business opportunities, which might involve sharing data with advertisers.

Taking E-Mail Off the Campus

Google Apps and and Windows Live@edu are the most popular services offered to colleges. An open-source product called Zimbra was just bought out by Yahoo and is used by many institutions.

The companies provide free e-mail with five gigabytes of space. Many colleges only allow 50 megabytes — or one-twentieth of a gigabyte — on their homegrown services. Colleges that use the commercial services may continue to use their institutional names in their addresses, complete with ".edu" at the end. They can even customize the interface so the Web application looks like part of the college's site.

Students do not see advertisements embedded in their e-mail, as they normally would with Hotmail or Gmail. After they graduate, alumni get to keep their college e-mail addresses — but then ads do appear.

The companies offer other goodies. Online calendars and collaborative workspaces allow students to coordinate study groups or parties and to work on projects online together.

Colleges that have made the switch report significant cost savings, upwards of $500,000 per year. Many of them have used that money to improve other student services.

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"We don't think we can keep up with the Microsofts, Googles, and Yahoos of the world," says Ira Winston, chief information officer for the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. "We thought it made more sense to let them provide it and focus on things that only we can provide for our students."

For faculty and staff, however, many colleges do maintain their own e-mail service.

Google first looked into working with colleges on e-mail a couple of years ago, says Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps. Students were pressing their colleges to provide the same quality of services that students found elsewhere online. Several institutions approached Google and asked whether they could strike a deal.

At Northwestern University, students approached administrators in 2005 and asked them to replace the university's antiquated system and its 50 megabytes of space.

Matthew Gruhn, a junior at Northwestern who studies computer science and political science, says he never used the university's e-mail service before it went to Google. There were just too many problems with it, and most stemmed from the skimpy storage space.

"You'd always hear about people who randomly got their e-mail deleted — those kinds of horror stories," Mr. Gruhn says. "I didn't like it or trust it."

The new Google services, introduced at Northwestern last year, work much better, he says, and the transition has been seamless.

Microsoft got involved with colleges in a similar manner, says Bruce Gabrielle, senior product manager of Windows Live@edu. ['']Students run out of space too quickly," Mr. Gabrielle says. "Then they just give up on e-mail, and the colleges can't reach them."

Actually, some institutions say that extra space for e-mail is not a big issue. Despite the allure of five gigabytes, that amount of space is generally not necessary for most people, says Amy K. Brooks, interim executive director of IT central services at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which runs its own e-mail. About 70 percent of Michigan users store less than 200 megabytes of e-mail data, Ms. Brooks says. Less than 3.5 percent have collected more than one gigabyte. And only 25 people have more than five gigabytes.

For most colleges that switched, the big incentive was savings. Colleges were able to stop spending money on staff and hardware that dealt with e-mail.

Arizona State University reports that it was able to reallocate $500,000 per year to other services that make a real impact on students, such as career placement. "The realization was that nobody went to Arizona State because their e-mail was better," Mr. Sheth, of Google, says. "But they are sure to go there if they think they can get a better job from there."

Even smaller institutions like Abilene Christian report savings of tens of thousands of dollars. "It was a true, significant savings," Mr. Roberts says.

Can Corporations Be Trusted?

Despite the advantages, the initial corporate pitch was not always greeted warmly by college administrators. "Definitely, there was skepticism early on," Mr. Sheth says.

Some thorny legal issues gave college officials pause. For starters, colleges are bound by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, or Ferpa, which protects student confidentiality. Routing internal university messages through a corporate behemoth could compromise that.

Company officials have tried to resolve those concerns with college administrators via lengthy legal discussions and written policies.

Google, for example, has a legally binding privacy policy that says the company does not share students' information

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with third parties, Mr. Sheth says. The company does not mine the data, he says, or gather information on students through their e-mail messages.

"With that we were able to get universities over that hump and get them to the point where they were ready to deploy," Mr. Sheth says.

Google does run advertisements in alumni e-mail by matching an ad with key words in the body of the message. But Mr. Sheth says the company does not keep that data or share it with advertisers. The software simply scans the text for words, similar to the way a spam filter would.

Colleges also wonder what would happen if the FBI wanted access to a student's e-mail or a court issued a subpoena. Would companies be less willing to fight such an intrusion?

Mr. Gabrielle says no. Microsoft's written policies with the colleges let the institutions decide how to handle such situations.

"We would point them back to the school," Mr. Gabrielle says. "If the school said, 'We want to fight this,' then we would fight this."

In short the colleges still control e-mail. The company just hosts the service for them.

Another concern was security. Google and Microsoft databases offer a treasure-trove of juicy information for hackers to attack. While some college officials worry about this, others believe the companies can handle security better than colleges can.

"At the end of the day, they're going to be able to put in security measures that we're not going to be able to do, just because of the size of the organization," Mr. Roberts says.

At least one college thought the new e-mail was too hard to access — not for hackers, but for disabled students. Rich Pickett, chief information officer at San Diego State University, says blind students use software that reads the text on their computer screens aloud. The Google and Microsoft services are Web-based, Mr. Pickett says, and do not work well with such programs. His university will not sign on with any company that does not fix that problem.

"We have a requirement that all information technology, including Web applications, are accessible to students with disabilities," Mr. Pickett says. "Very few universities have really pushed them on it."

Finally, colleges are suspicious about Google, Microsoft, or other companies giving away valuable services for free. They must, some officials worry, be getting something in return.

Kevin Morooney, vice provost for information technology at Pennsylvania State University's main campus, which still runs its own e-mail, says he knows what the return is: "In payment, they get eyeballs."

True, say Google and Microsoft officials. While they do not generate any advertisement revenue from the students using the e-mail, the companies hope to keep them as customers once they become alumni. It is an investment for the future, the companies say.

Although many institutions are still skeptical, Mr. Winston of Penn says, the discussion about whether to make the switch to vendor-run e-mail is taking place on nearly every campus.

"There are a lot of people who have a lot of fears about this," Mr. Winston says. "There are only a few schools doing it, but everybody is looking at doing it."

http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Volume 54, Issue 18, Page A1

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