Collaborative Technologies and E-mail and Messaging

Students use technology in natural ways that allow them to do what they want: communicate with anyone they want, in the time and space that suits them best. Easily accessible and user-friendly, collaboration tools allow students to explore, share, engage, and connect with people and content in meaningful ways that help them learn. By relying on the familiar ways students use these tools, faculty can enable new forms of communication and engagement in the classroom, permitting extensions and variations of the informal interactions already occurring in classrooms and hallways, and creating new frontiers for collaboration across geographic boundaries.

In the summer of 2007, Clemson University faced a large-scale e-mail system implementation. Looking for innovative ways to maximize limited staff resources, IT support managers created the Situation Room. Using Adobe Connect, support managers linked in real time to support personnel in the field to provide expert advice and up-to-date information throughout the implementation. The experience was successful, and the Situation Room was used to manage fall semester start-up support issues. Now at any time during support hours, IT personnel can enter the virtual room to find out about support issue trends and systems status and to access subject experts.

Live@edu is a suite of applications - mobile, desktop and web-based - to help students collaborate on campus. The resource links below include the Microsoft Live@edu Main Page; Microsoft Live@edu FAQ; and Microsoft Live@edu Blog.

Google Apps Education Edition is email, calendar, and collaboration tools right from the browser. The resource links below include the Google Apps Education Edition main page with introductory information; Case Studies from higher education custormers; Google Apps Discussion Group for Education Edition (EDU Administrator's Circle); FAQ; Google Apps Education Edition Terms of Service Agreement; and Google Apps Education Edition Administrator Program Policies.

The University of Wisconsin and Zimbra will discuss how they have led an effort at UWM to deploy high-quality enterprise collaboration tools and allow for the retirement of pockets of diverse, uncoordinated services. These efforts have focused on cost-effectiveness and community-building. This presentation will take a deep dive into how e-mail and calendaring can be used universally to benefit all campus stakeholders.

As more colleges move to Google or Microsoft, institutions start to consider the educational implications of the shift.

In February 2007, Google announced Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE), a collaboration and communication solution offered as software as a service (SaaS). Initially combining a portal, e-mail, instant messaging (IM), calendars, document sharing, and concurrent document creation -- all for the price of $50 per user per year -- the solution rapidly caught enterprises' imaginations.
This Burton Group study suggests that quickly adopting GAPE without understanding its quirks or looking at other alternatives is likely to become a career-limiting move. Happily, looking at the larger picture -- studying a variety of SaaS-based collaboration and content solutions -- is a career-enhancing move. Issues for higher education to consider include the SaaS delivery model, the capabilities of the solution, and Google as a company.
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This session will discuss Northwestern University's recent investigation to determine which external vendor might be suitable to provide e-mail and other student collaboration services for our student community. The process included vendor review and hours of working through the institutional process to arrive at an acceptable conclusion.

Recently a diverse committee of Berkeley campus leaders met with representatives from Google and Microsoft to explore the Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Live@EDU service offerings and to determine if these vendors' offerings in the areas of mail, calendaring, and web based file sharing are a reasonable alternative to UCB running these services locally (via the current CalMail, WebFiles, and CalAgenda services).

In addition to examining the benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing campus messaging services, such as email and calendaring, to one of these vendors, the committee also explored their associated collaborative tools offerings, such as collaborative writing; social bookmarking; photo, audio, and video sharing; and mapping, which may also be of considerable campus interest.

This is the report from that committee.