Re: Discontinuing student email service

["Gregg, Christopher S." <csgregg () STTHOMAS EDU>]

Along those lines, what are the schools that have outsourced student e-mail doing for the following scenarios:

- Students who are student employees where they need "work" e-mail
- Faculty and staff who also take classes and then have a need for a "student" account

Are you creating multiple mailboxes for these people; a student account in the outsource location, and "work" account 
on the locally hosted system?  Are you just creating one account and if so which way are you leaning?

We're considering an outsourced solution and this is one the challenges we're talking through right now.  Obviously if 
you move everyone to an outsourced model this is not an issue, but we're not likely to move fac/staff at this time and 
we'd like to keep e-mail related to those functions here.  Right now everyone gets a locally hosted Exchange account 
which is slick for automation and integration, but can be messy when a person ends one role but not all roles with the 
university.

Thanks,

Chris


Chris Gregg
Director of Information Technology
Information Resources and Technologies
University of St. Thomas
St. Paul, Minnesota
csgregg () stthomas edu

-----Original Message-----
From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Jason 
Testart
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 9:03 AM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Discontinuing student email service

Matthew Gracie wrote:
> Hall, Rand wrote:
>   
> > On the heels of another student email outsourcing question...it has 
> > occurred to me that some of us may want to step back and reflect on 
> > the following question:
> >
> > Why do we still provide student email accounts?
> >
> > We once provided labs full of typewriters and then computers. We used 
> > to provide our own dialup service. Once these things were 
> > commoditized we were able to largely eliminate them. Do student email 
> > accounts fall into the same lifecycle pattern?
> >     
>
> I can't speak for anyone else, but here at Canisius, the 
> college-provided email address is an official point of contact for 
> departments like the library, the registrar's office, and the bursar's 
> office. It's used in our CMS, our class-specific email lists, and a 
> dozen other places.
>
> Getting rid of it would mean either lots more postal mail or coming up 
> with some backend database of student's voluntarily provided home 
> email addresses. I shudder at the thought of maintaining that mess.
>
>   

We've been maintaining "that mess" for a decade or more now.  The email addresses are managed by our identity 
management system, which pushes the addresseses to an LDAP server.  The MX server cluster for our domain forwards 
appropriately based on LDAP.  We expect "userid () uwaterloo ca" 
to work, be it an on-campus or off-campus email server.

In addition to the reasons above, we like to think that forcing students to have a university email address prepares 
them for the real world where one has a "work email" and a "personal email".  Of course, the line between "work" and 
"personal" is getting fuzzy these days.

jt

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