ASU Picks Cloud Service for Education for Enterprise Tools
Arizona
State University (ASU) has agreed to use a cloud storage provider as its
primary secure collaboration platform throughout
all of the university's campuses and academic activities.
Dropbox for Education will integrate with ASU's current
identity and access systems, meaning its 10,000 faculty and staff will
not need
to create new usernames and passwords to use it. The service's file
request
feature and capabilities like unlimited version history and deletion
recovery
should make it easier for faculty members to quickly retrieve
information they
need.
"With
Dropbox, our reach becomes as immediate and
as broad as the Internet," said ASU Chief Information Officer Gordon
Wilshon. "An
ASU curriculum specialist working in Singapore can develop and upload a
shared
graduate curriculum and connect with an educator teaching in Paris, an
administrator in China and IT support in Tempe."
While
Dropbox had already been incorporated into
several academic departments at ASU, full deployment is expected next
year.
With
Dropbox's announcement, ASU joins a list of
about 3,000 educational institutions using its enterprise services,
including
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California State
University-Fullerton
and the University of Oklahoma.
Landing
ASU is a victory for Dropbox as the
competitive landscape is quickly changing regarding enterprise services
for
higher education. Rival Box launched its own Box for Education
initiative just
last month and has already signed up Pennsylvania State University,
Utah State
University and Emerson College.
The
ASU announcement is also significant because
it has moved faster than many major universities in integrating
technology.
Along with its approximately 90,000 students on five campuses, it has
about
17,000 students taking online classes.
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.