IT officials are considering updating Iowa State’s e-mail system, and one of the most promising options is outsourcing the university’s e-mail to a company like Google.

Although alternatives to the current e-mail system are currently being researched, David Popelka, associate chief information officer at Iowa State, said he did not know what steps ITS would take in implementing a new system if it chooses to do so.

“We’re still just in the investigation phase,” he said. “Our intent is to share whatever recommendations come out of our internal project team with members of the university community. There’s really nothing that’s been defined.”

Popelka said that, despite all the attention that has been given to outsourcing e-mail, it is not the main focus of ITS’ investigation.

“It truly is just an internal study within the Department of ITS, so we’ll be looking back from the community with feedback as to what they want us to do,” he said. “We’re trying to have this internal investigation done by June.”

Popelka said that even though Iowa State is a university founded on science and technology, he would much rather see resources allocated toward education than an updated e-mail system.

“We don’t have endless supplies of money, and all institutions are facing hard decisions on where they spend their dollars,” Popelka said. “We would have to put together a team of four or five people that did nothing but design and build e-mail technologies.”

James Davis, vice provost and chief information officer, said that even if the university outsourced to Google, there would be no legitimacy issues because all student e-mail accounts would still read “iastate.edu.”

Davis said corporations such as Google and Microsoft are always seeking more institutions to use their e-mail services.

“That’s part of their business model,” he said. “What they’re hoping for is that you’ll occasionally go to the Google Web page or the Microsoft Live Web page, and after you graduate, stay in contact with them.”

Adrian Sannier, university technology officer and professor of computing studies at Arizona State University, said Arizona State decided to outsource its e-mail to Google about a year-and-a-half ago. The move saved the university millions of dollars and improved its quality of service.

“We, like a lots [sic] of universities around the country, had a Web-based e-mail system we created for students. Space was low, [and] what we noticed was more and more of students were simply bypassing our e-mail and forwarding their mail to commercial accounts,” he said.

Sannier, who previously taught at Iowa State, said it was “a shame” that students weren’t using their campus e-mail.

“We think that the university gets some value out of a common domain,” he said.

Sannier said Arizona State looked into upgrading its system, but it would have cost approximately $1 million initially and $500,000 each year to upgrade the system.

Although outsourcing to Google increased individuals’ storage capacity to 6 gigabytes and added updated features such as spreadsheets, slideshows and other components, Sannier said that because of “the great world we live in,” Arizona State is not paying any fee for the services.

Since making the switch to Gmail, the ASU campus has had a significant decrease in problems and queries for IT.

“It’s an unbelievable choice we made as an institution,” Sannier said. “We get this extraordinarily increased service that keeps getting better over time. The number of support calls dropped dramatically. It was all good.”

Concerning issues of privacy, Sannier said outsourcing e-mail to Google was much like placing one’s money in a bank rather than stashing in under a mattress.

“There’s a common perception that if we keep the e-mail locally, our IT people are the ones ensuring this privacy and security,” he said. “Clearly, in the world that we live in, the resources that Google has to create a secure and private environment [are more advanced than a university’s].”

Iowa State is not the only regent university in Iowa to look into outsourcing e-mail. In the past, both the University of Northern Iowa and University of Iowa have looked into it.

Steve Fleagle, chief information officer at the University of Iowa, said Iowa had considered outsourcing e-mail while updating its system in 2005 but that technologies “weren’t quite ready.”

“At the time, we had to replace a lot of our e-mail equipment, so we had to make a decision: Should we invest some more or do something different?” he said. “[There were] a lot of things that looked very attractive about them but weren’t really ready.”

Fleagle said that because of time constraints, Iowa moved on to a more traditional e-mail option, even though, at the time, the leaders in e-mail were Google and Microsoft.

“The vendors weren’t ready,” he said. “It was a brand new thing for both of them. It wasn’t quite ready for someone to jump on.”

Fleagle said the university may reconsider in the future.

“I think that certainly there’s a lot of innovation in those collaborative tool spaces,” he said. “Both Microsoft and Google are trying to make a lot of new features.”

Steve Moon, acting associate vice president of information technology at the University of Northern Iowa, said his university had already purchased its new system before becoming aware of the options presented by Google.

“When we made the acquisition of our new e-mail system, Google was not an alternative,” he said. “It really wasn’t an option when we purchased our new e-mail system.”

Moon said that when the time comes to update the system again, outsourcing could be considered as an option.

“What we said at the time is that we’d recommended that we stay with out current solution until, financially, it became time to replace the hardware it was running on,” he said.

One potential feature of Northern Iowa’s e-mail system is a calendar feature. This is an addition that Iowa State’s ITS wants to integrate into its own e-mail capabilities.

Moon said Northern Iowa hasn’t taken advantage of the feature yet, but they would be able to if they wanted.

“We do have the ability to integrate a calendar, [but] we have not done that,” he said. “One of the things that would be very attractive to us to outsourcing to a commodity provider is new capabilities.”

Popelka estimated that anywhere between 3,800 and 6,000 students forward their e-mail to a Google account. Although some have already made the transition, he said ITS is treating the future of Iowa State’s e-mail delicately.

“We’re being very honest. We’re going to take a very careful approach to this,” he said. “It’s emotional for some folks, and some folks have a very strong opinion about the effectiveness of technology in the classroom.”

Sannier, who fully supports the switch, said he has found no problems or negatives about the current outsourcing of e-mail.

“I’ve consulted with hundreds of CIAs,” he said. “This is the smartest decision you can make. It greatly simplifies the deployment of the service your students are really going to like.”