University Business - October 2011 - (Page 32)

The overall costs of cloud email are almost always going to be less than with a traditional system, a good thing for the bottom line, but, of course, it’s all about the experience for students. Live two years ago. The school moved faculty to MS Exchange due to concerns over security and confidentiality. While Exchange cost $15 per person to set up, Windows Live cost nothing. “It was one thing to move the faculty to MS Exchange. It would have cost $450,000 to move 30,000 students there,” says Lloyd. Abilene Christian University, meanwhile, saved one third more than Saint Leo and gained a technical staff member. IT measures the savings realized from moving to Gmail using a year-on-year cost basis, over the last five years. “Our costs for email were about $120,000 per year on Webmail, including server hardware, software licensing and an email administrator,” says Kevin Roberts, chief planning and information officer for the institution. Gmail is free. “And we were able to repurpose our email administrator’s job, making him a software engineer,” Roberts explains. Smaller schools also see ample rewards in the cloud. Susquehanna University (Pa.) saved an annually recurring TCO of $7,000 to $8,000 by moving students from MS Exchange to Gmail, according to Mark Huber, chief information officer. Susquehanna now supports 5,000 students, and alumni, on Gmail. These figures should not be surprising. “The overall cost is almost always less for cloud email, especially when you factor in repurposing support personnel that maintained a locally installed email system,” says Tom West, chief information officer at Nova Southeastern University (Fla.). Storage and maintenance are mostly the responsibility of the cloud provider. Deployment Time Where there are cloud costs, they are usually incurred by planning and in the migration/integration processes. “Even with cloud 32 | October 2011 email, there will be a lot of planning, because a lot of email will be provided to a lot of constituents indefinitely,” says Brown. “That planning costs money.” Consultants, overtime for meetings, conferring with faculty, staff and students, getting their feedback—all these steps have associated costs. “It is one thing for an individual to decide to go from one email provider to another. It is quite another thing to have the school’s administration and IT department tell the school’s constituents they have to change over their email,” Brown explains. Integration and migration are also difficult. It took Microsoft about six months to deploy Windows Live at Saint Leo. Deployment would have been faster, according to Lloyd, but the school tied the new email system to its Datatel Colleague ERP system so that student registration automatically triggers email account creation. A cloud provider can help ease these steps, so administrators would do well to seek vendors to assist with these deployment gotcha’s. For example, Microsoft provided Saint Leo with support for the data system connection by helping the school convert the campus to Microsoft Active Directory, the vendor’s technology for storing IDs and passwords. “Once that was installed, the interface between our system and Windows Live was straightforward,” says Lloyd. “If we had been on Active Directory when we started with Windows Live, the deployment would have taken about a month.” Hamilton College (N.Y.) also had a lengthy deployment. Testing and deployment included a pilot project with 100-plus members of the campus community from February to June 2009. Conversion planning took from July to December 2009 and the complete conversion took from January 2010 to June of that year. universitybusiness.com Nova Southeastern University http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - October 2011

University Business - October 2011
Contents
Editor's Note
College Index
Ad Index
Behind the News
Sense of Place
Viewpoint
Human Resources
Cloud Email
Tuition Setting
Campus CFO
Independent Outlook
End Note

University Business - October 2011