Brown tests outsourcing e-mail to Google

PROVIDENCE – Brown University is launching a pilot program as it considers switching its university e-mail system to Google Inc.’s Gmail product, The Brown Daily Herald reported.
About 200 Brown students have been trying out the Google Apps Education Edition since June 30 and will provide feedback to campus administrators, Donald Tom, Brown ’s director of IT support, told the newspaper.
Tom said Brown has been considering the switch for about a year because of Google’s more robust storage space and popular application interfaces. The university has not decided when the entire campus would switch if the pilot is successful, he said. More than 60 percent of Brown students already forward their messages to Gmail accounts, Tom told Time magazine.
If Brown does outsource its e-mail service to Google, the school would be joining a growing trend among schools worldwide as institutions seek to shed internal responsibility for costly and complicated communication systems. In a survey last year by the national Campus Computing Project (CCP), 42 percent of schools said they had already outsourced their e-mail services or were planning to do so, and another 28 percent said they were considering it, Time magazine reported.
Google says more than 2,000 colleges and universities have signed up for its service, and Microsoft says it too has thousands of clients. Student and staff e-mails keep the university’s domain name, such as “@brown.edu,” even when the service is provided externally.
Arizona State University, Georgetown University, the University of Notre Dame and Trinity College in Dublin have all gone with Google, while Smithfield’s Bryant University is among the schools that have chosen Microsoft Corp.’s Live@edu product, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
After Bryant switched, Art Gloster, the university ’s vice president for information services, told The Chronicle one benefit for the school in switching to Microsoft is that it can now offer alumni e-mail addresses that they can keep for life, a feature that Google also offers.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly said Northwestern University uses Microsoft Corp.’s Live@edu product. Northwestern also uses Google Apps Education Education.