Outsourced e-mail gets mixed bag of reviews

Outsourcing school e-mail can be a great move, but be careful how you do it, say students and officials at schools that have made the switch.

Penn has announced that in January it will begin a switch to an e-mail system managed by Google or Microsoft. Officials say the goal is to avoid the cost of performing in-house upgrades, and any outside service would be free to Penn.

While Penn's system is still in the works, some other schools are already using an outsourced system, with varied results.

San Jose City College in San Jose, Calif., introduced Google Apps for Your Domain - the Google e-mail service for institutions with large user bases - this fall.

But Mike Remzi, director of finance and administration at San Jose City College, said student users have not yet taken full advantage of the service's features.

"There's a potential great use for" calendars and other extra features, Remzi said, "but it's just that students have not been made aware of" those uses.

Tyler Smith, senior consultant for Internet solutions at Matson & Ison Technology Consulting, says the key to introducing a new program like this into student life is to offer training for it.

"People don't want to waste time on things that they don't understand or that they don't think is useful," Smith said.

While SJCC's service is a standard Google product, officials here have said Penn's service would be tailored specifically to meet student needs.

San Jose student Tommy Wright said the student body there has had trouble becoming familiar with the extra features.

The system has "taken more time than we expected to get a grasp on the campus," Wright said.

But Wright attributes it to a variety of factors, ranging from insufficient promotion of the services to technophobic teachers.

"Teachers have been slow to catch on," he said.

He predicts that with more faculty support, the service would be utilized more.

Feedback "has all been positive," Wright said. "Everyone's excited about it. It's either good feedback or, 'What? We have that?'"

Officials associated with the University of Glasgow in Scotland - which is using the other program that Penn is considering, Windows Live@edu - say their school has not had such difficulty integrating the system into student life.

"As far as I am aware, [Windows Live@edu] is heavily used by our students, works well for us," said Les Watson, former vice chancellor at Glasgow, the first school to use the Windows program.

"This [outsourcing of the service], to me, is an obvious thing for every university and college to strongly consider," Watson said.

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