UW-Stout has announced it has selected Microsoft’s Live@edu product to provide e-mail for students.  The choice will save hundreds of thousands of dollars for the University while providing the students a better e-mail system.  The aging campus-based e-mail server would have cost about $300,000 dollars to replace over a three year span.

The big draw for students will be increased storage capacity.  The top problem students encounter every single year is filling up their mailbox with messages.  So many of us today are use to unlimited storage of our data.  ‘Delete Message’, what’s that?  Services like G-mail offer the ability to keep a running archive of every electronic conversation you engage in.  The risk associated with that luxury is your e-mail is only stored in the cloud, not on your hard drive.  That is what makes so many nervous.  If the ‘cloud’ goes down, then what?  Oh my godddddd!!!!

Some administrators at other campuses cite the recent G-mail outage that occurred for one-half of a business day as a reason to stay away from cloud-based e-mail.  Really?  Do you think your universities IT department has the technology, hardware and abilities to that of Google?  Your out of your mind if you think your better off just because the server is on your campus.  Google maintains a 99.9% up-time, and that figured isn’t carefully crafted with formulas and exceptions to make it seem amazing.  It is real 99.9% up-time.  What service can even approach saying that truthfully?  Not many.

There is no question universities are afraid to ‘lose control’ over their e-mail system; a life blood of any university, especially UW-Stout.  Companies like Google and Microsoft can provide better solutions than any university IT department in the country.  Google has some of the best network infrastructure in the world.  Why not utilize the power of their technology for your students benefits?

These positives do come with risks like:

• Network outage possibilities
• Glitches in the network (See Brown University Google Glitch)
• Difficulties complying with ‘Open Record’ laws.

Microsoft Live@edu rolls out on-campus today.  I’m anxious to see the new product and all of its features.  I’ll post a follow up blog with how the transition is going here and my thoughts on using the Microsoft product first hand.