Graduate Center to Change Student Email Host
Switch to Windows Live Will Give Students ‘Hotmail’-like Accounts
The Graduate Center is seeking to switch the hosting of its student email from an on-site system to one hosted by Microsoft, known as Windows Live. According to Assistant Vice President of Information Technology Bob Campbell, “CUNY recently signed a contract with Microsoft,” for this service, “that includes (primary) email accounts for all our students and alumni.” The student accounts for Graduate Center students will still bear the email extension “gc.cuny.edu,” and will never expire (although they go into an inactive state if not accessed for a certain period of time). They will also enable students to have a storage capacity of up to 5GB.
Campbell said that “these are really Hotmail accounts… and as such, they have lots of features.” These accounts will be subject to “normal Hotmail reliability and support,” said Campbell. James Haggard, Deputy CIO for Strategic Initiatives at CUNY CIS, said that Microsoft offered “higher degrees of reliability.” “The platform provides hundreds of millions of email accounts and thus their [Microsoft’s] investment is different from what we are able to do at the university.”
Currently there are two main companies that provide email hosting for higher education, Microsoft and Google. Both companies are able to customize email hosting for their clients. According to Haggard, “both run very large email systems, so either one would have been a candidate,” to host CUNY’s student email. Haggard explained that “when we first began exploring [external email hosting] as a solution 1.5 years ago, Google’s product was in beta and there were only two or three colleges on the West Coast using it, whereas Microsoft had a number of colleges that had their program up and running.” Thus, at the time CUNY began to pursue negotiations with Microsoft, which were subject to lengthy legal reviews. The negotiations “took an awful lot of time, effort, and energy,” said Haggard, “and we were so far down the road at that point that we didn’t want to start again,” to pursue Google, “especially when we saw the end of the attorney tunnel and knew we would be able to resolve the final contractual negotiations.” Still, many are wondering why Google was not more actively pursued, especially in light of growing concerns over the Microsoft Windows Live deal.
CUNY campuses are being brought onto the Windows Live platform in steps. The “guinea pig” was the Honors College, which assigned the new email accounts to its roughly 400 incoming freshmen this past fall. Phase One is presently in progress, said Haggard, and the campuses converting to Microsoft email hosting are Baruch College, York College, Medgar Evers College, the College of Staten Island, and the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC). Although Haggard said that he believed the Graduate Center was “very much interested” in being part of the Phase Two conversion, Campbell noted that the GC has not yet determined the date of when it will switch to Windows Live email accounts.
Haggard noted that there were two main reasons for having Microsoft host student emails: first, to offer students greater storage capacities; and second, to create more cost-savings that could then be reinvested in areas benefiting students. “Running an email server is expensive,” Haggard said. “One thing we’re hoping to see is a fairly substantial cost savings to the university. Email now is kind of like a dial tone – it is something that is pretty generic at this point. If we can offload some of the outgoing cost for email, then that frees up funds for more campus-specific things.” Campbell said that the GC made a “hard push for Windows Live because running an email server on our own is a pretty large challenge. There are a lot of issues associated with it.
Despite the good intensions of the new system, there are several points that have been red-flagged by users and the DSC: ads, branding, email forwarding, browser limitations for non-Microsoft internet browsers, lack of a unified email system for each campus (separating staff and faculty from students), and failure to take into account student input.
The new Windows Live accounts are free of third party ads, however, as Joe Ugoretz, Director of Technology and Learning at the Honors College pointed out, there are ads for Microsoft products on the student email pages.
The large presence of Microsoft product ads and logos on the CUNY Windows Live email accounts brings up another problem: the issue of branding and, with Windows Live, the now seemingly close association between Microsoft and CUNY. Haggard responded to this question by stating that “we reviewed the branding association… but while there is some co-branding, it wasn’t seen as being a ‘branding issue.’”
The issue of email forwarding is perhaps one of the most hotly contested issues pertaining to the Windows Live email accounts. Many students have multiple CUNY email accounts, either through their home campus or the campuses on which they work or attend classes. The Honors College students, for example, have not only their Honors College email accounts, but also often other accounts from the campuses at which they conduct most of their classes. As such, for many CUNY students, including those at the Graduate Center, email forwarding is an important feature, so that they can direct all emails into one central account. Campbell said that “when demonstrated to us this summer by Microsoft, the Windows Live environment did not support email forwarding, but they promised that would be available by the end of the calendar year.” The email forwarding function is now operational within Windows Live, Campbell noted in an update, but is left to each individual institution to decide whether or not they chose to enable this feature.
Haggard noted that the general CUNY-wide policy was to discourage email forwarding. “The university’s issue with email forwarding,” Haggard said, “deals with security and problems we’ve had with large mail forwards that end up getting us blacklisted from service providers. One of the triggers that they have in their rules in blacklisting an account is if there is a large influx from one account at the same time. A campus would send out a broadcast message to its students and a large number of those – which look nearly identical – get forwarded out to an external provider. Because it looks like spam they blacklist us and we have to get ourselves reinstated.” Still, Haggard acknowledged, “email forwarding is fundamentally a campus-based decision.”
Ugoretz said that for the Honors College, the inability to forward email was “an especially big problem as our students have so many other email accounts. Microsoft has allowed pop access to the Windows Live accounts, which is not something that regular Hotmail allows.” Pop access is a post office protocol that a client can use to access email on a server. Still, Ugoretz said, “pop access has been problematic. Not reliable and it erratically fails. Also, the procedure to set it up is a little on the complicated side and not well supported or documented aside from a sheet of instructions that was sent to us. The forwarding is just impossible.”
According to Greg Donovan, DSC Co-Chair for Student Affairs, email forwarding was a major issue for Graduate Center students. “If we are changing to a system that will not allow for email forwarding, then why the change?” he asked. Another issue that Donovan noted was that the Windows Live accounts were designed for optimal performance using a Microsoft-based internet browser. Students who use other browsers will have limited functionality of their Windows Live accounts, he said.
Another main concern raised over switching student email accounts to Windows Live was that it created a separation between students, and the faculty and staff. Faculty and staff email accounts will remain locally-hosted, as there are institutional requirements that archives of all employee emails be archived for at least seven years. Windows Live does not have this capability, thus only the student accounts are being converted. Donovan pointed out that for GC students who also work at the GC, this would mean that they will have two GC email accounts. Ugoretz said that “we wanted to have one system for everyone in the college.”
Lastly, there was the concern amongst GC students that they had not been consulted on a decision that would impact them. Donovan noted that the decision to switch to Windows Live was made without student consultation or input.
“We are happy that Bob Campbell has been so forthright with us,” added Rob Faunce, DSC Co-Chair of Communications, “and hope that he is able to take our concerns up with those at 57th Street who are not quit in step with the unique needs of the GC’s graduate student community.”
To this end, Campbell stated that the GC’s IT department will seek “collaboration with the DSC to help identify issues [with Windows Live] and work on a transition plan.” Any student interested in being involved should contact their DSC rep, or email Campbell directly at [email protected]
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