1. Outsourcing Student Email Services A transition to Google Apps for Education

2. Why we made the move… Our Students Our Old Email System (OpenVMS System) Our Options

3. Our Students Were extremely unhappy with slow IMAP Disliked the webmail interface and features Knew there were better options Were already jumping ship

4. Our Old Email System Was scheduled for replacement Had a dated interface and limited features Was slow, slow and did I mention… It was Was a texted based system with a 3 rd party web interface SLOW!

5. Our Options - Self vs Hosted Self: Exchange, Zimba, Sendmail or Novell Hosted: Google, Yahoo or Windows Live Finalists: Exchange vs Google

6. Our Requirements Customer friendly, intuitive interface Security of email, attachments and shared documents Web interface and IMAP interface Use of USU’s Central Authentication 99.9% uptime

7. And the Winner is… Familiar Interface Integrated document sharing Outstanding uptime Scalable (35K accounts and still growing) Google! Email accounts for life!

8. And the Winner is… Great service and support MUCH less expensive… $free.99 Google! Mailbox size: 7.3GB and growing…

9. How we did it… Commitment by many, many employees Involvement by Student Government Dedicated support from Google Marketing, Documentation and Tutorials in less than three months Buy-in from Students and Administration

10. Lessons learned: Gmail interface is intuitive and the majority of users were familiar with it Email related support requests were reduce 50% Google Apps for Education is incredibly stable, full featured and fast Google Tech Support is awesome, well informed and always available In 2.5 yrs, we have only experienced 2 brief outages

11. No, but the majority of students create an “Aggiemail” account upon being admitted, although… Is it required for students? Some Faculty members do require an Aggiemail account to communicate with their class members.

12. Can Faculty/Staff create an account? Yes, and many do, but… We have an enterprise Exchange system that Faculty/Staff are encouraged to use.

13. Would we do it again? Absolutely! Students love it and most of all they use it!

14. Aggiemail Information http://it.usu.edu/aggiemail

15. Questions? …Fire Away! Steve Funk - steve.funk@usu.edu