University of Alberta students will start to notice some changes with their school email, as the institution has taken the first steps towards outsourcing the service to Google.

It is expected that the move could save the school up to $1 million per year.

Jonathan Schaeffer, the U of A’s vice provost of information technology, considered the change after learning of email security risks through an audit. The risk stems from having many different email systems on campus.

“I found to my surprise that we have at least 30 independent email systems. It was obvious to me that we really needed one email, and I investigated options for unifying all of the email systems on campus,” he said.

But Schaeffer discovered that implementing a unified system would cost millions of dollars, which led him to investigate external outsourcing.

Schaeffer explained that the change has a long list of benefits, including everything from consolidation of on-campus I.T. infrastructure to increased mailbox size and calendaring for individual users.

However, there is a possibility that the servers that house Google data could be stored in the United States, but the U of A has taken steps to ensure that privacy is maintained.

“We’ve worked on a privacy impact assessment that raised no red flags. We’ve done all our due diligence there and we feel very comfortable. There are risks, but the risks are manageable,” Schaeffer said.

He also believes that people need to be aware of the differences between the public Gmail and the education edition of Gmail that the University may implement.

“The fundamental difference is that for the education edition, the University owns the data and Google is the custodian of it. And that has big implications. For example, on the public email, [Google's systems] read your email and use it to target advertising. That cannot happen on the education edition,” he said.

Currently, U of A lawyers are working on a contract with Google, and unless that contract is satisfactory, Schaeffer noted that they won’t proceed.

There are forums for students to express concerns and learn more about the potential change. And according to Students’ Union Vice President (Academic) Leah Trueblood, most students have had a few concerns over security, but come away satisfied.

“I’ve generally found students to be pretty savvy and receptive to moving forward in any direction,” she said.

However, first-year Science student Zach Siewert isn’t sure about outsourcing to an outside domain.

“Gmail seems to work all right, but I don’t know if we should switch to a third party,” he said. “If anything were to go wrong with Gmail, I’d prefer for the University to have their own email server.”

First-year law student John Schmidt is happy to leave WebMail behind, especially if it saves the University money.

“[Gmail] would be better because WebMail is really old, not very good to use, and it’s difficult to forward to iPhones,” he said.

The switch to Gmail is not only about overhauling email, but also about new technologies and keeping up with tools students are using.

“What I’m trying to do through this is hopefully make the campus more aware of different types of technologies and opportunities that are [in the] real world for our students right now, but maybe aren’t part of the mindset of how we think a traditional university should run,” Schaeffer said.

According to Schaeffer, there are several other universities in line to proceed with Google if the U of A does make the switch. The time of decision is unpredictable and depends on the contract.

Source:http://thegatewayonline.ca/articles/news/2010/01/25/google-s-gmail-selected-replace-email-service-across-campus