Spring Break
Google's Gmail system will give college more for less
Daniel Smolkin
Issue date: 5/11/09 Section: WCC News
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At no cost to the school, Washtenaw Community College will be switching from its outdated Web server, called Trig, to Google Apps. Google Apps will provide the school free e-mail storage for all of its accounts and an interface much like its e-mail service, Gmail.
There's a strong fi nancial incentive for the change, WCC's Chief Information Officer Amin Ladha said.
"If we use (Google's) equipment, we don't have to buy that. We use their space, we don't have to buy disk space, so it really does save us money where we do not have to
buy."
Use of Google will save the college a great deal of computer memory, allowing it to eliminate two servers, according to Systems Administration Manager Mike Aldrich. Servers are computers that store and handle memory in one centralized place for other computers
to access.
Washtenaw's e-mail servers currently allocate typically 100 megabytes per user. Google will provide about 7.2 gigabytes of memory, or about 74 times as much. And, with about 110,000 e-mail accounts, Google's donation sums up to about 800 terabytes of memory.
"To give an idea of the cost of that, our total storage space for the enterprise is around 56 terabytes," Aldrich said.
By not using its own servers, the college saves quite a bit of time and money it would've spent taking care of them.
The transition "allows whoever is managing the servers to do something else, because Google is doing that work," according to Ladha. This saves Rex Roof, a UNIX system administrator, quite a bit of time.
"There's someone I can call with Google Apps," Roof said. "There are actual engineers that I have access to that can get into the system and fix it. Even though I can't do it myself, someone, somewhere can."
On the student end of things, WCC e-mail will be much more attractive, if nothing else, with "all the bells and whistles that people expect," Aldrich said. Google Apps will come with more than just e-mail; students will be able to access a whole slew of tools, such as Google Docs and Google Calendar through their student accounts.
Google Docs is a Web-based software that allows users to create and store word documents, spreadsheets and slide-shows online. Users can also share the documents with others.
Despite the new interface, email addresses will retain their "@wccnet.edu" ending.
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