Campus Craze: Outsourced Email

If you're interested in the shape of email to come, take a look at the latest trend on college campuses, where IT pros are turning to outsourced offerings from Google and Microsoft.

Case in point: Facing an email upgrade crisis, the CTO of Oberlin College recently decided to adopt Google Apps for Education rather than refresh the school's internal system.

As a result, John Bucher estimates he will save over $100,000. But that doesn't mean the service will be entirely free.

"E-mail migrations are usually labor intensive in a college or university environment," writes Bucher in an email. "But the way I see it, we would have to spend these other costs (such as training, documentation, one-on-one help, etc.) anyway, regardless of how we decided to upgrade/migrate our campus e-mail services."

Besides free email, Bucher points out that savings also accrue from the fact that Oberlin won't have to construct the collaborative tools, like calendaring and document sharing, that come with Google Apps. "Not only do we get e-mail for free from Google, but we also get these other products."Oberlin is just one of dozens of colleges and universities worldwide that are turning to free email and collaboration tools from Google and Microsoft (the latter via its Live@edu offering). The two companies have made their non-profit offering so attractive that many can't say no.

Yes, there are downsides. The main one, acknowledged by Bucher, is the concern about privacy and security that come with any outsourced application. And at least one analyst, David Ferris of Ferris Research, lists a host of concerns related to the relative lack of sophistication in freebie services compared with paid-for software. (Ferris nonetheless encourages folk to look into these services for capital and operational savings.)

The tradeoffs involved are more than acceptable to many campus IT pros. And Google and Microsoft hope the goodwill they're building on college campuses will turn to gold in the solid revenue from commercial Google Apps and Live@edu offerings after users graduate.

In the meantime, the email outsourcing craze in higher ed is offering a unique glimpse at the rationale and challenges of outsourced email. There's also the chance that more players will get involved in competitive offerings. This is a trend to watch.

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