As private institutions, I suppose that these laws don’t apply to colleges. Some local K-12 network admins that I know have a conspiracy theory that these new archiving laws were pushed through by software companies who want to sell more expensive e-mail solutions to schools (who can least afford the software or the required tech support).

I like Google apps and agree with the notion that there are many other things that I could be doing that would more productive and interesting than managing a e-mail server (grants, training, researching new products, etc.).

I’m not a fan of Microsoft (I use a Mac, BTW – as do many network administrators that I know) and would personally like to see Google knock them down a few notches. I’m tired of paying licensing fees for Office and have tried (unsuccessfully) to convince my district to switch to OpenOffice. I really wish that more schools would take advantage of Google’s product and switch to free, open standards-based products.

I like how you mentioned the possibility of giving students a choice between services and/or using both services. From an IT perspective I don’t know that this would be easy to implement with e-mail itself, but for the rest of the apps I think it would provide a definite benefit. Another boon is that I am pretty sure both systems support single sign-on through active directory (and other services, but we mostly use AD here on campus). So by writing a small wrapper that integrates with the single sign-on APIs for both services, students could log in one time and access their e-mail, Google Apps, and Microsoft’s online applications (Skydrive, Office Live Workspaces, etc).

Google also mentioned that they intend to release a wiki of some sort for Google Apps in the near future. This could provide an incredible tool enabling students and faculty alike to collaborate online. Granted, right now the Blackboard system we use has wiki functionality, but it’s pretty poorly implemented. That’s my impression from limited experience with it at least. Blackboard’s wiki is also on a per-class, per-semester basis. With a Google Apps wiki, I’m assuming you could have wikis that span classes over multiple years and serve as a sort of knowledge base for classes here at the university.

On a mostly unrelated note, you were probably already aware of this, but the University has decided to stop offering Sakai for use on campus in favor of just using Blackboard. I’ve been at the University for the entirety of the “trial” of Sakai but never even heard about it until they decided to stop offering it. I’m pretty curious how much of the faculty/students on campus actually knew about the choice. Anyway, the press release is here: http://is.unl.edu/draft/sakai.shtml

They also talked about collaborating with other institutions using team edition. I was a little unclear how the faculty and staff will collaborate (since they’ll keep the old lotus system)- I assume they’ll just use all the Google product features except Gmail, and pick a Google apps username. I, for one, would be happy to switch to Gmail over Lotus notes!