Brown University switched students to Google Apps for education a little over a year a ago, and recently completed a similar transition for faculty and staff. In the interviews with CIO Michael Pickett one primary reason for the switch is requests from staff for collaboration tools, and a common platform with students. In traditional education structures there often are silos for student systems and business systems. Why the artificial divide? And who made the initial decision? According to Pickett student behavior led the charge. The majority of students were already using Gmail – what better way to ‘listen’ to users than to observe their behavior and be guided by those choices. Another shift from traditional IT top-down decision making. And integrated video chat? No more schlepping cross-campus for F2F meetings? Sign me up!
Brown’s CIO, Michael Pickett, told me that student adoption of shared documents and the collaborative features… Now … faculty and staff have come on board as well…He was also quick to note that both Google’s and Microsoft’s solutions in this space were quite good and he recommended that universities evaluate both to see which might meet their needs better.
Brown University has gone Google
Our students were really the ones that led us down the Google path… We also decided to go this direction because of the functionalities that we believe will bring our university together, namely tools like collaborative documents, better email (with nearly 30 times the storage space we had with our previous system!) and video chat.
Gmail@Brown – Brown’s email service for Undergraduates | Brown University
Over 60% of Brown undergraduates already use Gmail to read their Brown email. Moving undergraduate accounts to Gmail is a win/win situation: a great opportunity to give undergraduates the mailbox capacity they need, while also helping the university reduce expenditures.
Google Apps vs. Exchange: Microsoft Outlook Perspective on Google Apps EMail
I have lived through several eras of business communication and the most important lesson I have learned is to not cling to the past. Outlook and Exchange mail haven’t changed much in over a decade and it was time for me to move on. I won’t miss Outlook any more than I miss the typing pool.
ADD YOUR COMMENT
Comments are moderated.
Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
New articles are normally posted on Mondays and Wednesdays. Subscribe to the RSS feed or the email update to keep current on the latest posts.
Past listings from 2004 to the present
Need a home (or better home) for your website? I highly recommend HostRocket -- they are the best!
