End of Local Email Systems
Jan. 2, 2008 by ravishan
Over the Holiday Break, one of the topics that was debated on the EDUCAUSE CIO list was the pros and cons of outsourcing Email. It was very predictable – one group felt that it is strategic and therefore we should try to support it locally; another suggested that whereas it is OK to pave the way for outsourcing, we should try to retain local control of the name space and authentication.
I want to share with you my response to it.
Just so you know, I do not feel strongly that we add any value by supporting local email for the students. I feel very strongly, however that we need a common name space (Email Address) and authentication. Since we use single sign on using an email username, we need this level of control and it is essential.
Here is my response. I have edited a few things to make it clearer.
I agree with Marty (from Reed College) that the mail is outsourcing itself (He was referring to the student email). Also, as suggested in a few postings, I totally agree that a local namespace and authentication is critical rom various points of view.
Our students have been able to forward their emails elsewhere for a long time and we will be rolling out the transition to Google using Google Apps for Education and single sign on soon. Our faculty and staff use the local email systems and we believe that this will
continue to be the case in the near future.
There is a parallel to be drawn between the telephony and email…
There was a time not too long ago when the land-line telephones were considered one of the most important mode of communications with the students and before we knew it, the students moved on to cell phones and they didn’t wait nor did they ask us. I am sure, on average they pay more for cell phones than campus land line phones (I am talking
about the late ‘90’s and early 2000’s when we all lowered the charges in an attempt to keep them), but it was their choice. The same way, those who choose to move to Google or Yahoo! are doing it on their own and if they get charged for it later, it is their problem.
The bigger question is, is email the right form of official communication (with the students) anymore? If our own children are good indicators, “Email is for old people”… So, our future students may not care to read email. Therefore, at least for a significant portion of our clientele, the question may simply be “End of Email Systems?”….
To me it would make sennse to ask for an external email address from incoming students to link the @wesleyan.edu for them right off the bat (if they so choose, of course). While this doesn’t bring any new functionality into the picture, many students don’t realize we offer @wesleyan.edu “forwarding” and I see lots of clumsy attempts by students to do so in unsupported ways.
This keeps the @wesleyan.edu namespace, allows students to choose whatever email service they want, and could be done in an automated fashion for them as long as they filled in the information as part of their acceptance package (I’d imagine they’re giving us their cell phones in some fashion, so it’d be similar to that). More importantly, there’s little to support in this structure other than setting up the forward.
Admittedly this loses the authentication piece since it is unlikely every external mail service will often an opportunity to authenticate against our systems. To be honest, I’m not sure why we care about how students authenticate to external mail but it’s likely I’m misunderstanding something…
And on a side note from an ex-student who jettisoned his Wesleyan landline after one year of paying for it, (in 2003 at least) the cost of landlines were more expensive than a simple family plan cell phone. It came out that buying a landline would have cost me more a month than piggybacking on a family plan… and this isn’t even counting long distance.