Macquarie University has revealed plans to ditch its "inferior" Novell GroupWise staff email platform and replace it with Google's Gmail offering, following an earlier successful roll-out among students.
Macquarie University has revealed plans to ditch its "inferior" Novell GroupWise staff email platform and replace it with Google's Gmail offering, following an earlier successful roll-out among students.
We were spending a significant amount of money each year maintaining our own inferior email infrastructure
The institution had executed
a major upgrade to the infrastructure underlying its GroupWise
platform, migrating to a new gigabit network.
"It turns out that GroupWise itself, though it has its own
issues, has not been the largest source of operational email
problems and risk," she wrote. "Until today, the legacy network
that messages had to flow through actually offered multiple
critical points of failure."
But today the university's vice-chancellor Steven Schwartz
described the GroupWise platform as less capable than Gmail, announcing
that the university intended to move its staff onto the latter system.
"We were spending a significant amount of money each year
maintaining our own inferior email infrastructure that, despite our
best efforts, was falling further and further behind staff
expectations each year," he said.
Macquarie had previously migrated some 68,000 student accounts
to the Gmail platform. The staff roll-out is expected to touch a
further 6000. The success of the student roll-out had fuelled the
staff switch, despite initial concerns.
"We knew our staff would have questions about using an external
email service, particularly around privacy and intellectual
property and regulatory ramifications," CIO Bailey said in the
university's statement.
"But to their great credit, Google worked with us to mitigate
all of these concerns and we're now very comfortable in rolling out
Gmail to all of our staff."
The university did consider Gmail's educational rival, Microsoft
Live@Edu — which has stolen a march on the search giant at a number
of large Australian universities — but Bailey said Google's
solution was "more cost-effective, both in terms of initial pricing
and ongoing operational cost".
The Gmail roll-out will kick off this month, with three major
stages planned by the project's scheduled completion in September.