Teknoids

Thank you everyone for all your responses on this topic. I found it very
educational to say the least when it came to the privacy concerns. Now I have
to mull over all this great info.

Thanks again everyone!

Matthew Perna
Network Administrator
Touro Law Center
225 East View Drive
Central Islip NY 11722

Email: Mperna@tourolaw.edu
Phone: 631-761-7072
Cell: 631-708-6418

Support: IT@tourolaw.edu
Phone: 631-761-7070
-----Original Message-----
From: teknoids-bounces@ruckus.law.cornell.edu
[mailto:teknoids-bounces@ruckus.law.cornell.edu] On Behalf Of Daniel Nagy
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 11:28 AM
To: tom.bruce@cornell.edu; Teknoids
Subject: Re: [teknoids] Is anyone Using Gmail for Student Email?

All:

Yes I agree with Tom, and not because of the mind control ray either.
Zimbra seems to work well for us. I installed and administer it and it
is one of the easier pieces of collaboration software I have worked
with. We are running it on a virtualized linux server, which is a little
shy on resources, but it does just fine there. As Tom mentioned the
tasks are somewhat problematic, so we don't use them all that much. It
has much less glue code than other solutions we tried and seems to be
quite stable. I will mention that we all individually work it pretty
hard, but that our user base is small compared to the fac/staff/student
user base many of you have. It has built in backup capabilities which
will schedule dumps of the mysql database (no more flat mail files) and
LDAP database so it can be picked up at a file system level and backed
up. It does have some document storage capabilities which we have not
explored in full. They seem lightweight but functional. The syncing
between it and the mac so far has been almost flawless. If you use the
networked edition, as we do, you will get access to quite a few
connectors. The one for iSync (that's an apple product and, yes this is
written on a mac) is almost invisible to the end user. I use it to sync
iCal and other than installing it, which an orangutan could do, it has
not yet required any attention. The online gui is fine, not as simple as
Google, but is more full featured. It is java based. I used it almost
exclusively until recently and switched to Tbird to get some plugins.
Maybe in web 3.14159265 we will get java based plugins. If you are the
blood and guts kind of admin, the administrative interface will abstract
you from the goings on a bit too much for your liking. But you can
always strace one of the processes and get a warm fuzzy.

I will mention that one of the big bonuses for us having this type of
solution, that is to say our own, in house solution, is that we do quite
a bit of outside collaboration. As a matter of fact, mail/calendaring
would be one of the last things I would lobby to outsource. We gain
quite a bit by being able to share a mailbox, filter mail into it and
share it with somebody, be it fundraising folks or the feedback address.
There was nothing more frustrating when I did departmental
support/adminning then getting a new hire/visitor/out_of_band_
collaborator and have to apologize to them because central IT was taking
3 days to get them a main campus id and email addy. I assume this has
gotten better over the years, and I don't know what the Google subadmin
(and you WILL be a subadmin) interface looks like or whether this is an
issue. The ability to share data across disparate, even outside, clients
is key for us. There is also the issue, that (and I know NOTHING about
exchange and don't want to) most of the collaboration suits, even the
open source one's are getting easier to setup and admin, so the overhead
footprint is not what it used to be. I don't know resource wise, what is
saved by going Google. If anybody has a non biased study, I would like
to see it. Then there are the carbon based issues. Just because your
Admin/Director/Support_folks get to point at Google when something goes
bang does not mean that that you won't get snarky emails.

The Google enterprise wide KoolAid just tastes a little funny right to
me right now. I'm going to wait a few before I drink it.

Thomas Bruce wrote:

>
> Sadly, the Inside Higher Ed site seems to be down just at the moment, so
----snip-----

--
Daniel Nagy
dn56cornell.edu
SysAdmin
Legal Information Institute

Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati

gpg key here:
https://valiant.law.cornell.edu/gpgkey.html