April 8, 2008 Rusty Scott

Outline  Background & Motivation  A Student-Driven Initiative  Our Pilot Program  Going Forward

Background and Motivation  What are we trying to solve?  First and foremost, Student  Additional communication services available  Document collaboration  Chat  Web site creation  Alumni for life (not just forwarding)  Faculty and staff can opt in  For collaboration with students  Advising (calendar)

Outsourcing Perspective  According to the Campus Computing Project:  In 2007, year and 4-year institutions participated in the survey  Regarding outsourcing of student services:  Nearly 10% currently do  7 % are beginning to deploy in  10% will review programs this year

Properly Positioned

A Student-Driven Initiative  Spring ’07  Presented concept to University Technology Fee Advisory Board (UTFAB) – thumb’s up.  Fall ’07  Discussed with UTFAB, outsourced vs. in-house solutions for and communications services  Primary concerns regarding outsourcing  Privacy  Legal issues  Support model  Trusting the vendor  Students met with both Microsoft and Google  Students analyzed the offerings  Resource constraints dictate that we pilot one  In a close vote, Google was endorsed.

The Pilot – GA for CSU  Students assess functionality & fit  ACNS assesses:  Integration  Technical  Provisioning  Authentication  Transition to alumni status  Migration tools

The Pilot – GA for CSU (con’t)  Authentication with local (CSU) credentials through locally developed web page  A new subdomain  rams.colostate.edu  Address:  Nickname (alias):  The Google Apps ‘Start Page’  Lots of potential  Easy to use  Turn it off (for now)  Scope and creep issues  Successful login = Gmail interface  Access to docs, calendar, spreadsheets, presentations, sites

The GA Start Page

CSU ‘Start Page’

GA Interface

GA Docs

GA Calendar

GA Sites

GA Sites - Dashboard

GA Sites - Announcements

GA Sites - Files

GA Sites - Lists

Pilot Results  75 users in the Pilot  Half students, half IT staff  Relatively low survey response  However, EVERY response was positive  UTFAB was unanimous-ish in endorsing Google

Issues with which to Wrangle  Integration with existing processes  Provisioning, including applicants  Transition to Alumni status/domain  Taking full advantage of another (big) infrastructure and their spam filtering  Changes to  Personal websites  Is ‘sites’ good enough?  What’s the need given Facebook, Myspace, etc.?

More Wrangling  Migration  Wholesale migrations are possible, but sticky  Would only be for mail housed locally (not, for example, a hotmail account)  Supports Dovecot IMAP (we just transitioned)  Handles folders as well  Requires plain-text password(!)  Retail migrations issues  Local AuthN limits IMAP/drag & drop method  Would be nice, folder names = labels  Google’s Fetcher relies on POP  Timing

Going forward  Lacking show-stoppers, offer opt-in model for Fall ’08.  Eventual sunset date on undergraduate mail service, TBD.  This free lunch isn’t, but still worth the effort, IOHO.

Questions  Are most welcome