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Brown U Expanding Use of Google Apps

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 07/01/10

IT support at Brown University is spending the summer migrating its campus community to Google Apps for Education. The university projected that the move could save a million dollars a year.

In fall 2009 the Providence, RI campus provided Gmail e-mail service to its 6,000 undergraduate students. That service also included calendaring, instant messaging, and document storage. Now faculty, staff, graduate students, and medical students--potentially another 6,900 people--will be moved to the free service. The university reported the migration from Microsoft Exchange to Google is expected to be done in July 2010. At the time of this reporting, about 3,900 account migrations had been completed.

In a blog post published on the Google Web site, Geoff Greene, director of IT Support Services, wrote, "Our students were really the ones that led us down the Google path. They knew these tools would work because they already used them in their non-school lives. We also decided to go this direction because of the functionalities that we believe will bring our university together, namely tools like collaborative documents, better e-mail (with nearly 30 times the storage space we had with our previous system!) and video chat."

The "icing on the cake," he wrote, is "that we signed a zero dollar contract for all these top-notch tools."

Each user will have a 7.4 GB quota versus the 200 MB quota in place previously. A letter from the provost also cited as a benefit the ability to send attachments up to 25 MB in size.

The campus is hosting a "roadshow" to demonstrate functionality for the new Web-based services. It has also begun holding training sessions customized for each campus group or department. Plus, it has enlisted "Google Guides"--staff and students who have volunteered to help others make the transition to the new programs.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business for a number of publications. Contact her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.

Comments

Wed, Jul 7, 2010

Nice plug for your consulting service, Chris Lang. and thanks for making one poster's point about an industry springing up overnight to support folks migrating to google. I believe Brown still has an exchange server btw. Schools on GAE still need to run their ERPs and directory services. They also have to provide their own tech support for Google apps since google does not provide this.

Wed, Jul 7, 2010 Chris Lang http://www.thegwave.net

A few things this article did not mention; Brown themselves, in a quote on the Google blog, said that they plan to save almost $1 million in a year by using Google docs. Over 3 million students and faculty nationwide are using Google Apps this fall a 4 million outside the US. Google Wave, now waiting for your facility and students if you enable it. That is am major new benefit most forget to mention too. You may not all know it, but retail US businesses are going thru the worst period of this recession right now this summer. You may not know this because the US media does not want you to know. My business contacts were down in sales trends in June by 10%. So, if you think the average American has $20,0000 a year to send their daughter off to school like I do, you thunk wrong. Worse days are coming for higher education, we just can't spend the money like we used to. Besides, I would not send my kids off to a school that still supports a Microsoft data center. Google's example of computing from the cloud is the future.

Tue, Jul 6, 2010

Google scans your data. But they do not process it in the same way or serve ads like they do in the commercial service. Their scanning and ad policy does not specify how long they retain this scan information or log data.

Tue, Jul 6, 2010

To the last commenter - Google Apps for Education is not the same as commercial Google apps. So Google does not mine the data of these accounts as it might for commercial Gmail. Also, Google provides free tools to self-migrate accounts, so a third party is not always necessary. But I think you are correct about the granular account control

Tue, Jul 6, 2010 Bill

There are things you give up google apps. For instance, you cannot control accounts on a granular level... eg: one person cannot have a larger inbox quota than another... it's either all or none. So if several staffers need more than 7 gigs... and some do beleive it or not, then you move into google's paid services. But even without doing this, it's not "free." First, accounts have to be migrated to the new system just like any other... that usually involves paying someone, often a 3rd party... a whole mini industry of folks who do this have sprung up as Google has offered these "free" tools to business and education. Lastly, and this is the one that I am shocked that educators have buried their head in the sand about... GOOGLE DATA MINES YOUR STAFF FACULTY AND STUDENTS...!!!! Why is that okay? At the very least, should't we be talking about this? About the implications of institutionalized surveillance in academia? That is what it amounts to, and there is no way of arguing that it does not happen... and whether students care about this or not is beside the point. They also engage in drug use, unprotected sex and a host of other self destructive behaviors, but we do not blindly follow their lead in those cases.

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