Stan Martin North has been hearing enough student complaints about Webmail to pinpoint the most popular.
There’s not enough space.
Webmail has too few applications.
It won’t host HTML.
But problems with storage space and lack of applications could dissolve in fall 2009, when the Office of Information Technology plans to start testing either an upgrade of the existing Webmail service or piloting a switch to a third-party provider.
That’s the goal, at least, according to Martin, the director of outreach, communications and consulting for OIT.
The office has initiated a Student E-Mail Task Force, which is courting e-mail providers like Google, Microsoft and Zimbra, an open-source provider.
“We’re doing an investigation of what it is that we need to do with student e-mail in general. One of the things that we’ve been hearing is that there isn’t enough space. That’s one thing we’re getting the message on loud and clear,” Martin said. “One of those options would be to have another company provide e-mail for students.”
Webmail, a service provided by Cyrus, is an open-source provider that the University hosts for staff, faculty and students with Unity ID accounts, Martin said. The University has used this provider since the late 90s, he said. But with “relatively new offerings from these third-party vendors — it’s only been in the last few years that Google and Microsoft have gotten into the business of providing this service for educational institutions,” Martin said no options existed 10 years ago for a free provider with shiny, appealing applications.
Although OIT has customized Webmail to fit with its e-mail vision, applications like collective calendars and chat features — which other providers include for free — will cost the University.
“We’ve set up teleconferences with Google, Microsoft and Zimbra to find out more about their services, what kind of features they have and how they would interact with our environment,” Martin said. “We’ll compare all of the options that are there with what we’re hearing students and other stakeholders want to do with e-mail.”
Martin said finding the cheapest provider is the “crux of what we’re trying to do here.”
“That’s all what we’re trying to figure out,” Martin said. “We’re trying to put a dollar figure on what the savings would be if we outsourced it to Microsoft and to Google.”
It might seem to be an issue that has a simple solution. Both Gmail’s college application and Microsoft’s Live at Edu allow students to have access to their servers for free, which means no server maintenance for OIT personnel. Martin said the companies are willing to provide free e-mail access so graduates will continue to use their e-mail services, which will host advertisements only after the account is no longer associated with an educational institution.
Zimbra charges a fee per subscriber; on Webmail’s part, Cyrus charges fees for upping storage space options and adding other features.
The task force is also considering setting up a forwarding option on each student’s account.
“Most students have other accounts,” he said. “This basically would be pointing the Unity IDs so that you have your unity.ncsu.edu mail to whatever e-mail service you use primarily.”
But the solution isn’t simple, Martin said, adding that “in many ways, there will still be other costs. Even though these third-party providers are ‘free,’ there are other costs associated with doing that.”
“There are definitely some pros and cons with all of these things,” Martin said. “There are a lot of different costs associated with providing mail e-mail services on campus. It’s not just the Webmail tool, it’s all the servers on the back end that process the mail coming in. There’s spam filtering and anti-virus checking, which gets rid of more mail than it delivers. There’s more spam out there.”
University servers, he said, process incoming mail and parcels it out to IMAP servers, or mail servers, that students access to receive their e-mail. Webmail, the mail client, puts students in direct contact with those servers.
And when students send out e-mails, they go through additional servers.
If the task force decides to outsource its e-mail service, personnel who worked with these servers — which will be used minimally because the third-party vendor deals with mail through its servers — will either work on new or existing projects within the OIT office or manage aspects of the new provider.
“We’re paying for the server that we’re storing all the e-mail on, as well as the servers that do run Webmail and the other aspects of the e-mail service on them,” Martin said. “One of the biggest costs is, frankly, in the personnel to manage this sophisticated environment on campus. If we end up saving personnel costs to providing this service, there will be other personnel costs in outsourcing.”
Students using an outsourced e-mail provider might need to log in through the N.C. State Web site or through their cell phones, he said.
“You might be talking directly with Google servers, but might be putting in an Id and password for Gmail. These are the kinds of details that would have to be worked out. Do we give out other e-mail addresses and passwords? It would end up being a re-purposing of the personnel from one role to another role. It’s not like we would be losing staff if we were to outsource. There are lots of things that we want to do in OIT, it’s not like we would be laying people off or something.”
Some of the cost-cutting could occur in letting personnel who are dedicated to e-mail pursue other projects they are working on, he said.
As the task force evaluates each of these factors, it is also asking for student input on its Web site. Martin said it will also start groups on social networking sites like Facebook to reach out to more students.
“We want to get students to get some feedback from other students to see how they’re currently using e-mail,” he said.
In a memo from Marc Hoit, vice chancellor for Information Technology, the task force will need to send in any recommendations by March 1 to initially implement “any improvements be the start of the fall 2009 semester.”
