Yale Begins Move to Google Apps
Yale University's Information Technology Services (ITS) department revealed Monday that the campus will formally move to Google Apps for Education, the free suite of online collaboration and communications tools, including hosted e-mail, calendars, video chat, and productivity software.
In a post in the Yale Daily Bulletin Monday, Chuck Powell, associate CIO for operations, support, and services within ITS, said the move is designed to benefit students with additional services and free up staff to handle projects that the internal ITS department is better suited to handle. He added that the move has taken security concerns into consideration, concerns that had been raised last year when hints of the move became public. "We have a contract with Google that we think takes good care of Yale's privacy and security," Powell said in the Bulletin post.
According to Powell, "Yale currently uses a combination of Linux IMAP servers and Microsoft Exchange servers as its central mail solution. Yale will move to aggressively source as much of its e-mail to cloud based vendors as rapidly as can be managed, starting with the student population."
The migration to Google Apps is expected to be completed by the end of the 2011-2012 academic year for students and for the 2012-2013 year for faculty and staff, according to the university. Some departments with specific needs will remain with an on-premises e-mail system.
| Editor's note: This article has been modified since its original publication to correct a factual error. We previously stated that Yale was using Microsoft Exchange for its current e-mail solution. Yale is actually using a combination of systems, as it is now noted in paragraph 3. [Last updated April 20, 2011 at 9:21 a.m.] --David Nagel |