IRT to offer new e-mail services by spring
Ali Qari
Issue date: 1/11/08 Section: News
Drexel University is expected to announce a host of new student communications tools during the weekend of Jan. 11, including email, chat and online storage from both Google and Microsoft, according to Drexel officials.
The services will be Google Apps for Education, Microsoft's Live@edu, and Microsoft's ExchangeLabs. The University will also continue supporting Drexel's current WebMail service, according to Ken Blackney, assistant vice president of core technology in the department of Information Resources and Technology.
Students will not be required to pick an individual service and will be able to maintain all four accounts independently, according to Blackney.
"We aren't outsourcing mail like other schools are doing. I think most of them are choosing for you: Google or LiveMail. I don't think any school has done, as far as we know, this kind of a program where we've added multiple providers," Blackney said.
The program, coined LinkEdu by the University, will provide a total of over 16 gigabytes of e-mail storage space over the three separate provides for all Drexel students, a significant increase from the 100 megabytes offered by the existing University housed WebMail system.
"We signed the contracts [with Google and Microsoft] because we wanted mail. There's no way that we can provide five gig mailboxes to every student. … If anything happened to the server, recovery time would be immensely large," Blackney said.
Both Google and Microsoft are offering similar services along with their e-mail clients, including document sharing features, web based document storage, calendars, chatting, and blog and webpage publishing capabilities, among other features.
The University-wide launch of LinkEdu is expected to be in March 2008, during which time students will be able to register at account.drexel.edu.
Both the Microsoft and Google products are being offered free of third party advertisements and to the University free of charge.
The services will be Google Apps for Education, Microsoft's Live@edu, and Microsoft's ExchangeLabs. The University will also continue supporting Drexel's current WebMail service, according to Ken Blackney, assistant vice president of core technology in the department of Information Resources and Technology.
Students will not be required to pick an individual service and will be able to maintain all four accounts independently, according to Blackney.
"We aren't outsourcing mail like other schools are doing. I think most of them are choosing for you: Google or LiveMail. I don't think any school has done, as far as we know, this kind of a program where we've added multiple providers," Blackney said.
The program, coined LinkEdu by the University, will provide a total of over 16 gigabytes of e-mail storage space over the three separate provides for all Drexel students, a significant increase from the 100 megabytes offered by the existing University housed WebMail system.
"We signed the contracts [with Google and Microsoft] because we wanted mail. There's no way that we can provide five gig mailboxes to every student. … If anything happened to the server, recovery time would be immensely large," Blackney said.
Both Google and Microsoft are offering similar services along with their e-mail clients, including document sharing features, web based document storage, calendars, chatting, and blog and webpage publishing capabilities, among other features.
The University-wide launch of LinkEdu is expected to be in March 2008, during which time students will be able to register at account.drexel.edu.
Both the Microsoft and Google products are being offered free of third party advertisements and to the University free of charge.
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