E-Mail Outsourcing

By: Jonathan Barber

If you forward your Ursinus e-mails to another account such as Gmail, you may be surprised to know that you are not alone. According to an article on InsideHigherEd.com, more and more students are forwarding their school e-mails to personal e-mail accounts. Therefore, it is not so surprising that many colleges are choosing to outsource their e-mail systems, according to a front-page article in the Sept. 25, 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education. “Outsourcing” in this case would involve a college’s e-mail system being run by an off-campus entity, namely Google or Microsoft, as opposed to by the college’s Instructional Technology department. According to an Aug. 14, 2009 article on TIME.com, in the 2008 Campus Computing Project (CCP) survey, 42% of colleges said that they had already switched or intended to switch to an outsourced student e-mail service.

Could Ursinus see such a change?

Network Technologies Manager James Shuttlesworth says that it is “unlikely” that Ursinus would go the outsourced e-mail route in the foreseeable future. The first reason, he says, is that Ursinus can’t necessarily trust student information “to an outside vendor.” Being that important information is transmitted via e-mail, privacy issues could arise if an entity other than Ursinus’ IT department oversaw the operation of campus e-mail. The other reason, Shuttlesworth says, relates to the issue of “system persistence.” If Ursinus outsourced its e-mail to a company which changed its terms of service or, worse yet, went out of business entirely, the college could be left in a position where it would have to switch the system over to Ursinus’ IT department and server with little notice. John King, Chief Information Officer of the college, agrees: “While vendors will try to be as responsive as possible, you still are totally dependent upon an outside entity to act on your behalf.”

Another reason for Ursinus not switching to outsourced e-mail which was not mentioned by Shuttlesworth or King could be the job security of IT department workers. If e-mail maintenance was to be accorded to an outside organization, then there would be less work to do for Ursinus’ IT department workers. Job cuts could potentially result.

The Web site of “Google Apps Education Edition,” the outsourcing service that Google offers to colleges and universities, lists the top 10 reasons for schools to switch to the service. One of the reasons is that schools can save money: “Outsourcing the maintenance of servers to Google frees up resources that would have been spent on additional licenses and upgrades.” According to an Aug. 14, 2009 article on TIME.com, such upgrades are covered by the company that runs the e-mail system. Furthermore, both Google and Microsoft insist on their Web sites that they do not charge educational institutions fees to outsource their e-mail systems.

However, as King specifies, the college does not spend a great deal of money on e-mail services as it is. “As a participant in the Microsoft Campus Agreement program, the cost to us for Exchange and Outlook is minimal.” King even went so far as to say that it “would make no economic sense.” So, switching to outsourced e-mail would not change anything major from a financial perspective.

The main benefit to outsourcing Ursinus e-mail would be the dramatic increase in mailbox storage size. Ursinus.edu’s IT section states that students have a maximum mailbox quota of one hundred megabytes. Outsourced e-mail provides multiple times that space. Google Apps Education Edition, for example, boasts over seven gigabytes of storage per student. According to a simple conversion operation at UnitConverter.org, seven gigabytes offers is over seventy times the space as a hundred megabytes.

However, according to Tech Support student workers who were surveyed, outsourcing Ursinus e-mail would not make practical sense. Few of the questions that are presently posed to Ursinus Tech Support student staff relate to e-mail problems, which indicates that there may not be many e-mail-related problems that could be solved by outsourcing e-mail. Ty Wetzel, a junior Tech Support worker, “A very low percentage of students actually come in asking for assistance with e-mail.” Emily White, a senior worker, agreed. “The vast majority of the questions I see fall into categories that wouldn't necessarily be resolved by outsourcing.”

In fact, outsourcing could even make the problem worse, White reasons. She alludes to Shuttlesworth’s point that Ursinus IT staff need to have control over the operation of the campus’ own e-mail system. “It's my opinion that switching to a third-party server would just create additional barriers to resolving a tech support issue because we wouldn't have immediate access or control to resolve the issue.” In that situation, she says, “We would be little more than experienced users of the system.” Outsourcing e-mail is a major decision which requires consideration of finances, privacy, storage, and the operational and administrative structure. While it seems to be practical at other colleges, it may not be suitable for a college such as Ursinus.


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