Australian university moves 74,000 email to cloud

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia has, on 18 July 2011, moved 74,000 students’ email accounts to the cloud after finalising it’s selection of Google Apps for Education in April this year. Staff email will also move to the cloud starting December 2011. This move is seen to eliminate the university’s cost in running email servers and providing email storage, explained Brian Clark, Executive Director of Information Technology Services, RMIT.
Money spent on this implementation was also minimal as Google Apps for Education is free, said Clark. RMIT paid for license for services around email gateways, archiving and spam control. “IF we were to implement it ourselves, the 25 GB inbox [that comes with Gmail] will cost a few million bucks. The economics around cloud solutions are very attractive.” But cost cutting isn’t the only reason for this cloud move. “(The move) wasn’t necessarily done for cost benefit but for additional functionality to students and staff,” said Clark. “There’s a range of collaborative features built into Google Apps’ technology that will allow students to collaborate on assignments.”
Google Apps, with its instant messaging services and multiple same-time editing of documents, is seen by the university as a platform for collaboration and integration. Clark explained that it will be a functional too that supports RMIT’s current learning management system, BlackBoard, rather than a replacement. “This isn’t a replacement. It is giving them an RMIT supplied domain and environment for Google Apps that creates an automatic community of all students,” said Clark.
Next year, RMIT will look into integrating functionality between BlackBoard (which is already cloud hosted) and Google App. Clark also said that CRM could one day be moved to the cloud as more solutions mature and offer the right amount of data privacy.
RMIT has taken two days to provision the 74,000 email addresses and students’ email migration will do done manually by the students themselves. The old email account, that has been in use for more than a decade, will be kept active for “a number of months” or as long as needed so students won’t lose their correspondences.