Tuesday 8 September 2009

Outsourcing student email

updated 10/09/2009

Outsourcing of student email is very much a theme for this year. And I personally can never remember who has outsourced to whom.

Consequently, to keep track of this I've started a little Google Docs spreadsheet to list which university is doing what.

It's now reasonably complete, but there may be a number of errors as my methodology was pretty crude - go to each university's home page - search for webmail, and from the login screen try and guess the system used. Consequently I'm sure that there's some inaccuracies. As 'other' encompasses a range of solutions including webmail clients to other mail solutions eg dovecot I havn't attempted to categorise things further.

Conclusions?

Of the universities checked, outsourcing is in the minority, with most preferring to host in house.

A number of universities, eg UTS, have used exchange labs as a staff email system while maintaining an older in house system for students. One might think this was a prelude to an end of semester migration of student email, but then one might be completely wrong.

Of the outsourced, microsoft is in the clear majority with Windows live.

Please advise me of any updates or errors in the spreadsheet.

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