University Business - October 2011 - (Page 36)

Cloud Downtime Experiences around downtime with cloud email vary widely. When The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania outsourced its email to Microsoft’s Office Live in August 2009, users experienced many issues around uptime, according to Deirdre Woods, chief information officer of the school. “We run Exchange here at Wharton. We did a lot of work to make it work with Office Live,” says Woods. Users will always want instant access to email, so downtime is a crucial But the downtime was much greater than they experienced consideration for administrators in deciding what email system would be with their internal email system. “There were hours of downtime. best for an institution. We had assumptions that it would run similar to our own email our own upgrades,” Smallen explains. There is no downtime for service. It was disappointing to see that they couldn’t match our upgrades with Gmail. uptime,” Woods recalls. But good uptime is not a given. To have some type of guaran“There were also significant email delivery issues due to spam. tee, administrators should ask for a certain percentage of uptime in We have mailing lists where we communicate with our students. the SLAs in their contracts with cloud email providers, according Jobs are important to our students. They would get very delayed to Leonard. The contract should allow for penalties to the provider messages about meetings with recruiters,” Woods explains. if they cannot meet uptime requirements. In one instance, Wharton experienced a 12-hour delay in receiving email. They brought their mail back in-house again in Compatibility May 2010, leaving the Office Live cloud email service (Whar- Cloud email services are generally compatible with popular email ton has no experience with Office365 or other Microsoft cloud clients. “Office365 supports Outlook on Windows PCs and Macs. email products). “We were early adopters and Microsoft was very You can use all the popular email clients such as Thunderbird and helpful in transitioning us back to our Exchange environment,” Apple Mail too,” says Brown. acknowledges Woods. Abilene Christian University uses Outlook. “There are plug-ins Saint Leo’s experience was much better than Wharton’s. “In to make Gmail work in Outlook,” Roberts affirms. three years, there have been two or three periods of downtime,” says “The new release of Windows Live looks just like Outlook,” Lloyd, “and not for significant amounts of time. There has not been says Lloyd. You can set MS Outlook to pull email from Windows as much downtime as with MS Exchange.” Nova Southeastern Uni- Live too. In fact, students at Saint Leo can use Outlook or any versity has had similar experiences with Live@EDU. “In the three other email client with Windows Live, whether they are working years we’ve been working with Live@EDU, downtime can be mea- on a PC or a Mac. sured in hours and for the most part was planned maintenance or system updates. When a local installation goes down, it often goes Summing Up down for an extended period. With cloud-based email, outages are The cost of cloud email is significantly less than an onsite email rare and of limited duration,” says West. installation, if not nil. And no one should avoid adoption out of “Downtime with Gmail is minimal and losing email is not at fear. “There are enough schools with experience in this now that all likely,” says Roberts. “Google designs systems so there is no people thinking about it can be confident about sending email to single point of failure.” In the only memorable incident, accord- the cloud,” says Lloyd. ing to Roberts, users could not get Gmail for about 10 minutes. Roberts agrees. People’s fears around moving email to the Then it was back up with cloud are like the fears of no lost email. old world sailors around Gmail actually imtraveling to the edge of proved uptime at Hamil- Gmail for Business (part of Google Apps for Business), the world. “They believed ton College. “The ability www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/gmail.html there were dragons waiting to deal with down time is- Intermapper (Dartware’s network monitoring software), there,” says Roberts; they sues was enhanced by tak- www.intermapper.com were afraid to go. “There ing advantage of Google’s Live@EDU, are no dragons here in the www.microsoft.com/liveatedu/free-email-accounts.aspx expertise. Google has been cloud. It is actually a pretty incredibly reliable—prob- Marsh FINPRO, nice place to be.” http://usa.marsh.com/ProductsServices/FinancialandProfessional.aspx ably better than our inMS Exchange, house email system when www.microsoft.com/education/en-us/products/Pages/exchange2010.aspx David Geer is an Ohio-based considering the down time technology journalist. His Oracle, www.oracle.com we needed when doing Twitter handle is @geercom. Resources 36 | October 2011 universitybusiness.com http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/gmail.html http://www.intermapper.com http://www.microsoft.com/liveatedu/free-email-accounts.aspx http://usa.marsh.com/ProductsServices/FinancialandProfessional.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/education/en-us/products/Pages/exchange2010.aspx http://www.oracle.com 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