Ed Brill

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1. 1  Mike Gotta http://mikeg.typepad.com | 1/4/2007 3:58:17 PM

   In my experience, educational institutions are frustrated with e-mail, student e-mail in particular. Virtually all studends come to the institution with a consumer e-mail service (AOL, Google, MSN/Windows Live, Yahoo). Yet colleges need to ensure that they have an e-mail address that they can reliably send certain types of notifications (course changes and such) which, in-part, justifies giving them a .edu e-mail address. But many clients tell me that they struggle to get students to pay attention to that inbox. So it's no surprise that surrendering to a consumer service might take hold. That then acts as leverage for instructors to use that service as well (as the article outlines). e-mail appliances are an option as well that might have been given some analysis as well.

1. 2  Kevin Mort  | 1/4/2007 4:11:53 PM

   I remember my student years as a lab consultant at IU Bloomington. When we rolled out HPUX with the pine mailer, this became the standard everyone used, and hey it was good at the time. The servers were local, we controlled them and they worked.

   What bothers me with this Google approach is that while I understand that cost control is always an issue, I think there are some data control issues here to grapple with (as somewhat mentioned in the article) in addition to the fact that there is a heck of a lot that can go wrong between Arizona and Google's datacenter.

   There is a vast difference between "sorry outbound mail to Internet is down" and "sorry ALL mail is down."

   I would vote for the on-site enterprise-class route. Universities of this scale are major organizations, and I believe this type of service is valid in that environment.

   Kevin.

1. 3  Matt  | 1/4/2007 4:37:51 PM

   A friend of mine used to study at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK - they've got a rather nice student/lecturer portal system based on Domino. You can take a look here: { Link } - the funny thing is they don't use notes for e-mail :-/

1. 4  Linda Pelfrey  | 1/4/2007 4:40:21 PM

   One point that wasn't mentioned is that in the extremely unlikely event IT asked the users, I suspect they would prefer Google for a number of reasons.

   While some students would have used Outlook Express and few Notes, they almost all already have a web mail account.

   The Google solution would give them much newer software than Microsoft/Lotus. While Lotus does a new release every couple of years, it does not immediately get deployed. And the sort of institutions that would evaluate this choice, would tend to be the sort that upgrades every other release.

   I'm sure that the Google solution would give the users MUCH more disk space; the idea of a Notes admin allowing each student to have even a small half-gig mailbox seems unlikely to me.

   The Google solution might also be friendlier for non-Enterprise-Linux and Mac users; certainly than Microsoft's solution.

   The access from anywhere aspect of webmail would seem especially useful for students.

1. 5  David Bell  | 1/4/2007 4:54:56 PM

   I have been working on a Portal / Domino / Collaboration deployment with a university in my most recent project. About 50k students, faculty and staff.

   Google quotas were often referenced there, seen as an almost limitless resource and not having to worry about managing email so how do we compete with that ?

   Approx. 80% of students forward their mail to their existing personal account, but at least they all have a .edu address. Not good for security of content since there is no check or balance on what is fwd'd, it's all or nothing.

   Introducing other collaborative services, like calendaring, ST chat / web conf and QP under a Portal delivery mechanism to facilitate campus community, and providing access to the Domino-hosted mail too, it is hoped that this will be appealing to students and will entice them back to using university services.

1. 6  David Bell  | 1/4/2007 4:55:51 PM

   P.S. The services are accessible from anywhere, as many of the students are not full-time or on campus.

1. 7  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 1/4/2007 6:47:04 PM

   @4 - 1) IT often isn't asked their opinion and is told what to deploy. It isn't IT's fault that users aren't asked.

   2) Domino has webmail

   3) That's highly subjective. I have implemented every Domino release since 5.0, within 90 days of it being released.

   4) Mail quotas are a business decision, not a technical one. If an organization wants to invest in the disk space that's their prerogative. The Notes admin can only work within the limitations he's given.

   5) Not sure what the point is here.

   6) See #2 above

   I hope that helps you better understand why some of the seemingly irrational things are done they way they are.

1. 8  Flemming Riis  | 1/4/2007 6:51:33 PM

   personally i wonder where you can get a storage system for 100k a year that will support 65k users with a resonable quota :)

1. 9  Keith Brooks http://kbmsg.blogspot.com | 1/4/2007 8:09:54 PM

   We had these discussions internally back in 99,2000 when I was trying to champion Domino as a million user solution.

   Well it was possible then and is now, but the costs were and still are very high to do so.

   But if anyone wants to back it, I am still open to producing the system for it.

1. 10  Chris Miller http://www.IdoNotes.com | 1/4/2007 8:50:08 PM

   As one of the largest partners that have participated in most of the larger academic installs since 1999, I can say the approach is not without merit.

   Hosted Google domains provide integrated instant messaging, a .edu subdomain can be pointed at the Google mail servers and then the students get calendaring (cross awareness for friends and classes), reliable POP3 mail access from the Google account or pulling others into Google and a large quota.

   Now before anyone gets rattled, I still believe Domino is the better solution, including full integration with the university systems. DWA works well with lots of bells and whistles. Sametime is a no brainer, however the Google Talk access now has the voice and offline IM storage ability. It is built into the mailfile, just like Sametime and DWA.

   The costs for hardware management at most academic sites for thousands of students is too much for the demands students have on such systems. When most all public providers offer 2GB, a 100MB limit is unreasonable to them. Not saying they need more with proper storage management, just in their eyes.

   I personally believe that academic sites should start treating these systems as mission critical and robustness should be put in place. We host numerous academic mail systems for staff and students and we see students get the short end of the stick most of the time. A few schools have decided to offer web clustering and scaling with large quotas for students to our happiness and the students.

1. 11  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 1/4/2007 9:03:38 PM

   @2 off topic -- Kevin, when were you in Bloomington? I worked for IU BACS/UCS in 1989-1990. HPUX/pine sounds a little bit more recent than my time - we were still running VAXclusters named by color. And if you made a wrong turn in the computing center, the PDP-11 was still running :-)

1. 12  Alan Bell http://www.dominux.co.uk | 1/5/2007 3:21:39 AM

   @8 based on the calculations on this page { Link } but only using 9 storage nodes it looks like a 65 terrabyte storage facility (1GB/user average) would require a $170,000 investment, maybe depreciate this over 3 years and allow for some replacement disks gives about $60,000 per year.

1. 13  Sudhir http://www.sobis.com | 1/5/2007 4:04:10 AM

   I have been a long time reader of your blog and I find it utmost informative. We are IBM's business partners in India.

   Funny that you bring this issue, beacuse last year we partnered with IBM to pitch for Lotus Domino to a very reputed college in Bangalore. The sales cycle was for almost 6 months and the competitors were the ones that you mentioned, Exchange, Sun, oursleves.

   We had tough time convincing the mgmt of the college. The Sun solution was almost being offered for free, Microsoft was almost giving exchange for free as a part of the partner program with universities. We had an interesting time debating it with everybody there. And of course there were people who questioned why students should have enterprise mail and not have yahoo, gmail etc.

   We had also pitched in with a combination of Domino web access and webmail, so we had a tough time, but eventually we did get the order :-) 5000 Licences.

   We learnt a few things, pricing was aggressive, but we were able to convince the mgmt of the enterprise worthiness of Domino.

1. 14  Villi Helgason  | 1/5/2007 5:19:41 AM

   @3 - The server is down: { Link }

   Looks like you have been "ed brilled" :)

1. 15  Matt Buchanan  | 1/5/2007 6:37:01 AM

   @14 - errr...ooops? :) Ach, they're on google, they're fair game ;)

1. 16  Paul M. Kelly, Jr. http://www.salvationarmy.org | 1/5/2007 7:12:35 AM

   While your entry hints to other applications, the cost savings of an integrated e-mail/application system is an identity management system. With an external e-mail system, you still have to build the identity management system for the other applications such as enrollment, transcripts, etc. Further the integration of e-mail with applications benefits both the faculty and the students.

1. 17  Wayne Weinheimer  | 1/5/2007 10:55:18 AM

   There are very distinct communities (students, faculty, admin) in a University that all have different criteria.

   - Does a student require the ability to have one message or all their mail restored?

   - What about the controller or someone from payroll?

   - Is a student’s e-mail mission critical? Is the Auditor’s? Is the Dean’s?

   - For investigative purposes, can a manager get access to someone else’s GMail account?

   From Google’s point of view, this is an excellent test for GMail, is it ready for the enterprise? I think the real test will come when Google releases a GMail appliance, similar to their search appliance (visit Boeing’s web site to test one out).

   With an appliance being local to the company’s data centre, issues such as no data backup and reliability of the Internet line to Google’s web site are removed. Bringing GMail into the data centre would of course remove some of the cost savings.

   An appliance may not be the best solution for a University with 65,000 users, but for a company with less than 500 users it may be a good fit.

   With regards to the advertising in GMail, I think it’s hilarious how incorrect the ads are. If a student or user wants to spend time clicking on ads or surfing the Internet, they will regardless of what GMail is offering in the sponsored links.

1. 18  Dave Madison  | 1/5/2007 1:29:31 PM

   From a purely email functionality perspective, from the end user perspective, arent't the MS and IBM/Lotus solutions pretty much equal? Both have web mail, both support internet based standards.

   I think Paul missed a minor point.. both the Microsoft AND the IBM/Lotus solution impose costs on both users and IT. If not, in what area does IBM/Lotus not impose costs?

1. 19  Kevin Mort  | 1/5/2007 3:15:32 PM

   @11 offtopic - Ed, I was in Bloomington 1990 - mid year 1995. I was with UCS as a student and after graduation as well.

   You are correct the old VAX cluster was Amber, Gold, Rose, Jade etc. I still have all of my VAX account data here somewhere. : )

   The HPUX "Shakespeare" mail system with PINE was installed roughly 1994, and I had the pleasure of teaching the consultant pool how to use it. Fun times...

   And yes I believe I ran into that PDP-11 more than once.

   Kevin.

1. 20  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 1/5/2007 3:23:13 PM

   @18 let's see -- the ability to run on a Linux operating system, for one. No requirement for Windows CALs. The ability to scale 20K users on a single box (like a System i, such as one organization in the UK does). Like the lower labor costs for e-mail only. Murphy actually addresses this:

   "The other two choices cost less, have better reliability records, and don't impose monopolistic burdens on either IT or its users -i.e. your decision either way doesn't dictate your decisions on issues like identity management or staffing and doesn't force your users to choose between enjoying the wonders of Outlook/IE on Windows or the daily joys of discovering whether your latest patches or upgrades have silently made their browsers or email clients incompatible again."

   @19 ah, you don't go back far enough for primary color VAXes :-) I guess I could have included the whole BBS SYSOP chapter in my "five things you don't know about me" blog entry. Another time. Go Hoosiers :-)

1. 21  Kevin Mort  | 1/5/2007 3:40:11 PM

   @20 - lol I suppose you are right there, don't recall any others than those. Although there was the Orchard, and the NeXT Labs... This is getting scary, visions of 8088s and Zenith PCs... Go Hoosiers indeed. For a moment I thought they might just pull out a win the other night.

1. 22  David Bell  | 1/5/2007 4:28:59 PM

   @7 - the point I was making was an illustration that yes students like to use their personal mail, that Google's *seemingly* limitless resources are a major attraction at the expense of security, and that in deploying an enterprise solution you have to provide more than just email to be attractive to users.

   Another point, Universities are regularly subpoenaed to provide historical email in legal cases. This is much more difficult I suspect when you don't have control over your own data.

1. 23  Jeff Anderson  | 1/5/2007 7:15:38 PM

   Ed, your point about the other things that you can do with a Notes/Domino system other than just email is the biggest differentiator for this discussion over all the others made in this thread. The problem is that there are not solutions or products that provide a compelling reason to choose a Domino solution over a Google one. IBM and its partner community (which I am a part of) need to do a better job of this. Back in 1995, 1996 in Notes 3 and 4, West Publishing provided 'The West Education Network' that was a Lotus Notes based extension to the legal classroom. At the time, this was revolutionary. We need more ideas like this.

1. 24  Goran Angelov http://erm.ibs.bg | 1/7/2007 11:01:51 AM

   The world has changed....and all we must adapt to the new conditions.

   Companies like Google are changing the way we live and do business and in near future our environment for work and life will mix and so the tools we are using.

   I love Notes and Domino but I can not disagree with the decision of that IT about Gmail services. "Sells out the organisations" Paul says, but if you compare 10k per year with nearly 1-2M initial investment you will go for Google too. The question here is not whether students need enterprise class messaging (maybe most of them do), but does IBM need universities among it customers.

   Maybe Paul things that IT is stupid but I thing he has no choice and more institutions like his will follow. The answer I believe is in a complete new IBM strategy for education industry. Give that IT a real option to google's offering. Give him all Lotus/Domino, Workplace and Portal licence at cost of zero and propose a subscription service for maintenance and support like DB2 ExpressC and Websphere Community edition.

   For many of you this maybe sounds stupid, but this is the only chance to have a young person convinced in advantages of enterprise class messaging and collaboration.

1. 25  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 1/7/2007 1:13:04 PM

   @24 we do have an offering like that, where licensing for students is included in a campus-wide agreement. Follow the Monash University link in the initial blog entry for one organization that took advantage of that.

1. 26  Goran Angelov http://erm.ibs.bg | 1/7/2007 4:43:50 PM

   @25 That is really a good story, but the announcement includes this paragraph "IBM offered a one-stop shop for software and implementation services that minimized the time and resources Monash would need to spend managing the implementation and software licensing processes."

   Nothing is said about academic offering at no cost for sw licenses.

   And I meant that IBM should provide this offering to all academic institutions without boundaries not an occasional project.

   In my country (Bulgaria)for instance all universities are building today their future and they are facing the same dilemma. Still they are trying open source solutions for collaboration and some of them take MS offerings but soon they will have to decide ... To Google or Not...

1. 27  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 1/7/2007 5:36:24 PM

   @26 Goran, maybe it would be helpful to read the details of the Academic Initiative at

   { Link }