Outsourcing email

Those of you who've been paying attention know that WWU is in the process of trying to outsource our student email. This has been going on for close to two years now, and we're now in the process of trying to get Exchange Labs working. So when I saw this article on Computerworld about this topic I had to read it. The article is more about the Google service, but includes some parts about the other offerings out there.

We went with Exchange Labs in part because we already had everyone in Active Directory, and the migration should go a lot easier that way. Or so we thought. We've been having major issues getting things talking. In theory once the communications channel is set up it should just work. We shall see.

One thing in the article that caught my attention was this:

Drexel University earlier this year launched a pilot project in which it will give some of its 20,000 students a choice of four e-mail systems: its own Exchange-based enterprise e-mail, Gmail, Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail and Microsoft's Exchange Labs, which is a pilot program for online, Exchange-based hosted e-mail that was launched about six months ago and is based on what will be the Exchange 14.0 release.

If we can't get it really working for us, something like this might be a good idea until such time as we can get true automatic provisioning done. It'll be a manual process (this is me wincing), but could get the product in the door while we work out bugs. Eh, who knows if this is where we'll go.