Assessing the benefits of Gmail
In a follow up to my earlier earlier blog on Gmail, the University of Auckland has now moved students and [...]
Posted on July 21st, 2008 by Steven Schwartz
In a follow up to my earlier earlier blog on Gmail, the University of Auckland has now moved students and staff who wish to shift to web-based Gmail service. Macquarie was first in Australia to move students to Gmail but staff have not yet been (officially) moved, although responses to the blog made it clear that some staff members already use Gmail.
Some of the concerns about Gmail have now been answered. There is no impediment to using Outlook or some other program as a front end to Gmail if you really want to spend the money.
As Gmail has many mirrors (high redundancy), the probability of permanent loss is vanishingly small. No university has the same level of redundancy.
Of course, there is still the concern of having your mail stored on a private company’s servers, but we seem happy to do this with banks and credit card companies.
On the whole, the pluses seem to outweigh the minuses – or am I missing something?
Comments
Interoperation with Unified Communications (Voice and Video over IP, Out of Office communications, teleworking) Lack of control over faults. You may not have a satisfactory response from IT services now (because we don't have any set SLAs at present), but you will get NO service at all from Google. Archiving and backups - totally out of the University's control - if done at all. Bandwidth (traffic) in and out of the University. The fact we only have one Internet Service Provider (part owned by the University) - the Internet outage we had last week was because our fibre was cut to our ISP by the company who leases the fibre to them. Our ability to access Gmail is directly related to our ability to get out to the Internet - not so with in-house email systems. Reassurance by association isn't a good business case, in my humble opinion. What another institution does for themselves isn't necssarily the right way to justify our following suit - they could be the Pied Piper...
Stephen Boyle - ITS - July 21, 2008
Good points, Stephen. The other one that hasn't been addressed is the privacy issue. Yes, banks and insurance companies and credit companies and goodness knows who else have our details, but that's a personal decision we make in exchange for receiving a service, and there are controls on third party use of that information under Australian law. Will the gmail server storing our information be onshore or offshore? What legal protections do we have if it is offshore? How would we take action (in what jurisdiction) if there was a breach of privacy? At least our internal service providers are accountable to us through our own structures. Anyway, it is not just our individual privacy that is at stake. Researchers and research participants are often use email for contact and communication, some of which may be highly sensitive. Will we have to inform research participants that their communications (and identities) will be held by a third party? I think I'd want to know, if I was participating in research. I think one of the comments in response to the earlier gmail post was worth noting: that we should be looking for the best solution for the university, not just whether or not to use gmail. Has the option of fixing our internal system been fully canvassed?
Cathy Rytmeister - July 22, 2008
Cathy's response is spot on. Credit card companies and banks store personal details and transaction details but I don't (and I wouldn't want to) share my emails with them.
Christopher Lueg - July 25, 2008
I think, which ever way it will go, there needs to be a decision quickly! This way, ITS and/or other IT departments can get on with fixing what they have (like I have heard of some departments moving or upgrading to Exchange servers currently) OR we can move to gmail and at the very least have a stable email system. Personally, the security arguments are a little weak and I am sure addressed by Google, and the issues with unified messaging etc can be worked out, should we even be looking at Unified messaging anytime in the near future at all. Its gone on too long and we need to move forward.
Alex - August 18, 2008
GMail is one of the few solutions in the world of cloud computing. The concept of "software as a service" is an evolving phenomena which is changing the way we do business. While there are many PESTEL (political, economic, social, technical, ethical and legal) arguments in adoption of this change, I am sure this will all become history due to strong business drivers. Weather Google products are the right choice compared to others (e.g. Microsoft especially if you are already using Microsoft environment e.g. http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/) is worth evaluating. What is definitely going to add value to your business is seamless integration of your environment (e.g. Directory services, PABX, desktop software, etc.) with "software as service products"
Amit Ambardar - August 29, 2008
Of course it makes sense to move to gmail. Gmail provides a service that is better than that provided by in-house IT departments. It is more reliable, gives the user more storage, allows larger attachments, has a better web interface, has *better* backup, and so on. It is also, I imagine, vastly cheaper to provide than having IT staff maintain an email system (with associated backups, etc) in-house. I have been student and/or staff at 4 Aus. universities at various times (incl. Macquarie, though some years ago), and the arguments about privacy and legal issues do not sound genuine to me. Does the university refuse to use couriers or postal services of third parties? Of course not. I have ditched my university supported staff email account long ago in favour of the free one avvailable from Google, because Google's free product is better than the university's one. I wish *my* university would bite the bullet and just sign up with Gmail for staff (and student) accounts. The money saved could be put into more appropriate things.
Peter Rickwood - September 10, 2008
An interesting issue in this discussion is that two distinct issues are being conflated. These are: 1. Pros and cons of moving to an externally hosted system. 2. Features of GMail as a specific product. These are really separate issues. There are many vendors that provide externally hosted e-mail services. In fact, some of these (e.g. Messaging Architects) even offer an externally hosted "Groupwise" service (this is NOT a recommendation). Some of these services address what seems to me a key lack of GMail for a business environment - lack of integration with other messaging "services" (such as calendar and task management). Perhaps these alternatives should be part of the discussion. Cheers, SamB
Sam Burshtein - September 25, 2008
Thank you for your help!
ted Grinstead - April 21, 2009
It sounds like you're creating problems yourself by trying to solve this issue instead of looking at why their is a problem in the first place
Sharolyn Lickley - April 28, 2009
@stephen boyle i agree with your point about a lack of response from IT. A whole lot of shoulder shrugging and 'I cant do that' & 'I dont know'. Sure is great that my data wont be lost, unfortunately nobody at the library will print it for me. apparently i need a USB and nobody told me anything about that. I may as well lose the data for all the good its doing me
Ashley K - September 9, 2010