This video doesn’t really need introduction. It isn’t a revelation to anyone that campus email systems generally only serve to be sources student/faculty frustration, while at the same time resource hogs requiring significant hardware investment and multiple staffers for upkeep and support.
“Google Apps is helping Arizona State University become a highly flexible university that can provide extraordinary technology experiences for its students. Google’s integration of webmail, instant messaging and calendaring is second to none.”
– Kari Barlow, Assistant Vice President, University Technology Office, Arizona State University
Read the Arizona State Case Study
Recently, members of the University Technology Office at Arizona State University asked themselves some important questions: “Why is our talented IT staff spending so much time patching, upgrading and maintaining software and hardware systems that don’t keep up with the pace of innovation in consumer technology? And how do we get those staff members to focus on creative applications of technology specific to our university?”
…Students were already using it: From mail logs, ASU could see that approximately 3,500 students were already forwarding their student email to Gmail; this gave ASU confidence that the solution would be well received, and that students would know how to use it thus eliminating any training costs. “I enjoy using Gmail because it lets me keep a lot of my emails, especially those with attachments, without going over my quota,” said David Aniuk, ASU Student. “I really like the layout too; it’s not very overwhelming to look at so it doesn’t strain my eyes. And I have not received a single spam email in my Gmail account,” he added.
…ASU will migrate all 65,000 ASU students to Google Apps by the end of school year 2007, and eventually bring the service to the entire community, including faculty, staff and alumni.
More customer experiences here. In fact, Google has a specific section dedicated to Apps for Education.
This seems like a no-brainer to me. It’s a matter of resources. A good many universities could be spending money on more important projects, and sourcing critical tools to organizations that simply do them, ..better. Much, much, better.
August 9th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
[...] HTML email is a tricky, albeit controversial thing, and the time I spent designing it was dwarfed by the time spent ensuring that it would display correctly in our campus webmail app as well as a wide variety of other email clients, as a big percentage of students have their email forwarded to less cumbersome email providers (which is another subject entirely, …a big shout-out to computing services on the great state of campus email) [...]