I’m glad Dictator Jim Yong Kim got his way to push microsoft in. Why the big song and dance about the “study group” to make a formal recommendation? The study group never publicly announced their recommendation: “Kotz did not announce his findings to The Dartmouth “out of respect for the process.” (http://thedartmouth.com/2010/05/27/news/email) How much do you want to bet that that recommendation was GOOGLE and kim just ROLLED right over it?

Is microsoft paying him off or something? God. “We’ve decided to submit our report and let the administration read it before any decisions get made,” he said."

Oh dear. Given the length of my name and corresponding e-mail address, I really hope alums get the option to pick alternatives to their full names as well.

Right, right, because when one thinks “COMPUTER SECURITY,” one thinks MICROSOFT!

Microsoft’s reluctance to allow users to export their data is infamous, so you’re going to lock students into using this system.. and watch in giddy delight as they have to leave four years of data accumulation behind? The fact that MS calendar won’t sync with Google’s is crime (and evidence) enough that this decision should’ve been abandoned.

Further weakening the argument is this claim that MS’s offering is more robust. This hardly is true, as most reviews of Office2010 found it woefully unfinished.

But nevermind the evidence, it’s the result that was demanded, so let’s twist the available data to suit the conclusion, consequences be damned!

Fine. Just don’t try to convince us this decision was made for any other reason. It’s an inferior, hyper-proprietary product being chosen after the initial, heavily researched, choice was rejected.

Hope our vaunted research facilities remain untainted.

As a short history lesson, Google was recommended over Microsoft last summer. Upon his inauguration, President Kim urged another study group ‘reconsider’ the recommendation. A new group was formed which, again, urged the College to make Google Apps the default for students, faculty, and staff in Arts & Sciences and at Thayer. This decision flies in the face of student, faculty, and alumni opinion that Google would be better for Dartmouth than Microsoft.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/comp/email-cal/initiatives/mos/cct-exec-sum.html

This is the wrong choice.

First, I would be surprised if Blitz is gone by Fall 2011 given the number of times that blitz has been scheduled to be replaced. At one point the College said the ‘14s would never see Blitz. A quick search of “blitz” on The D’s website yields countless reasons why Blitzmail is important to the social culture of Dartmouth, and this shouldn’t be taken lightly. While unfortunately Blitz is greatly lagging behind today’s technology, it’s important to use student input to decide what will be the best new system for the College. As seen in this article “BlitzMail replacement delayed” http://thedartmouth.com/2009/09/25/news/blitz , student’s clearly prefer Google’s Gmail over Microsoft. Unfortunately, when he came to campus last summer, President Kim switched his office to Microsoft email. Ok, that’s fine, it’s his office, and Microsoft has many benefits over Blitz in terms of running a business, but now he’s putting his decision on the entire student body. This is just another way President Kim is using his power to do what he wants, regardless of input from students, and in this case, the College’s Computing Services employees who have known BlitzMail for years, not months. President Kim may think this is just another business decision, but it’s time to realize seemingly replaceable aspects of Dartmouth like Blitz actually have a big impact and effect students far more than his greater plans for pushing his own agendas ie. PIH.

Students, why not set up your own instance of Google Apps? It is free.

If the quest is for the best monolithic collaboration services provider, then Microsoft is sort of a forgone conclusion. I suppose the question might have been better posed whether that is in fact the best goal. It’s from that point the objections will undoubtably derive. The online collaboration space is currently filled with a bunch of competitors vying for “best” but in every case the monolithic offerings have some absolutely rotten drawbacks.

One can easily argue instead that if the choice instead is to choose the best of each category, then there are some really great standouts. On the other hand, I doubt our dear Dartmouth has that luxury to spring for those at the moment.

Let’s recognize what the college is up against if they were to go with that segregated approach. It means someone special needs to maintain the server for the document sharing repository, and some special other person needs to maintain the email server, someone else for the calendar, etc. Actually, each best-of-breed service might need its own server, and the hardware & OS needs of one will undoubtably vary one from another, so now you’ve we’re dealing with varieties of hardware and OS’s too. Sure, it can be done, but — oh yeah — the economy is tanking by all measures right now. And Dartmouth’s endowment? Can our wonderful little college in the woods afford that kind of extravagant expenditure right now? I’d say they’d be doing well to avoid it!

So go with the Big Bad solution and they get lots of advantages. The collaboration setup that does actually function (regardless of its quality in some aspects), they get full tech support FWIW with one single huge support agreement, single-type hardware on which they can afford to install redundancy, and they can minimize the onsite maintenance crew.

I could tease that 2011 will probably be marked by all greenies receiving the dreaded empty “winmail.dat” email as the announcement of the changeover, but it really does sound like the right solution for now. It wasn’t stated as a “forever” solution, and what they’ve stated they need is something that solves the existing problems as soon as possible.

Hey Ted, long time no see. I assume you mean Exchange 2010 and not Office 2010? I’ll disagree with you on that, we’re preparing to move Tuck from Exchange 2007 to 2010 and it looks pretty good to me. Also keep in mind that the College is buying into a hosted solution so this is not exactly the same as Exchange 2010, more like a cousin.

You’re spot on, Peter. A best of breed approach would be extremely expensive to integrate and maintain. (We could debate if hosted vs. on premise is a better option.)

Something people need to keep in mind is that before President Kim arrived the College was deciding what to buy for “email” and nothing more. Google is very good at email. President Kim changed the requirements. He wanted collaboration, shared calendars, better mobile device support, etc., and he wanted that to work across all areas of the College. Google is not as good at those things and making a hybrid selection (Microsoft for staff and Google for students for example) would be difficult if not impossible to make functional.

The benefits of a unified system that just lets people get stuff done overrides any particular affection or dislike people have for one brand or another. We have alumni at both companies who I am sure were lobbying for their product. Both companies spent a lot of time talking to the College about the requirements and costs and a choice was made.

It is a business decision, not a popularity contest.

This is a sad day for me. I learned about emailing via blitzmail. I mean, while other schools were screwing around with txt based systems called “email” we had a system that was essentially a precurser to modern day IM-ing back in 1990! You could drag and drop files into blitz and mail it to someone. my friends at other institutions couldn’t only send txt based emails using archaic DOS looking interfaces. But alas, the world has changed. blitz has become RIMS blackberry to Googles Android. sigh. nothing lasts forever.

“We have alumni at both companies lobbying…” It helps when one of them has the former Chairman of the Dartmouth Trustees. A business decision, or a political one?

As a Google Enterprise Specialist who sells Google Apps to companies for a living and is also a Dartmouth Alum, it’s extremely disappointing to hear representatives of the College state that they thoroughly investigated both Microsoft BPOS and Google Apps, and that BPOS won out due to collaboration, security, reliability and mobile requirements. I see this fight every day and Google is hands down better at these functions; last year alone Google Enterprise Apps delivered over 100 new function innovations to its users – how many did Microsoft deliver in the last 3 YEARS? Not only does Apps exceed BPOS (which is insanely expensive, Google Apps for Education is FREE to universities) in feature and function (chat, video, VOIP, gdocs = collaboration!), but BPOS doesn’t even offer the same functionality as Outlook and Office 2010 clients – the College is actually moving backwards when it comes to collaboration. When it comes to security and reliability: BPOS for a fact goes down regularly – check their RSS feed with reliability updates to get a sense for how bad it is: https://rss.microsoftonline.com/feeds.aspx?center=default&chan=notifications&lang=en-us. And finally, Google is literally redefining mobile solutions over competitors like Apple; Apps is the epitome of mobile – all you need is a browser (any browser, Google is dedicated to platform independence across browser, laptop, computer, mobile phone, you name it) and the internet. I guarantee Microsoft can’t say the same….besides, who still uses Internet Explorer?! And isn’t more than 50% of the College Mac users…last I checked IE doesn’t run on those without spending money on building a virtual machine.

When it’s all said and done, when it comes down to email, this is all a religious war – Microsoft versus Google (I’ve been doing this for years, it’s all about preference and people’s and generations' inability to go with the flow when it comes to new technology). But if you really want to make this about a business decision, then please don’t tell alums and students who contribute significant amounts of money to a billion dollar+ endowment that Microsoft is provides a better business case/decision. Google Apps is free to Higher Ed and add on services for security and collaborative solutions are significantly discounted, the cloud solution frees up IT staff so they don’t spend time dealing with patching email servers or administering email accounts and instead allows staff to focus on what’s differentiating to the business – which is providing a quality education to Dartmouth students and not rolling out email solutions. Instead, staff will be dealing with an inferior solution that is unavailable a fair amount of the time and spending more money to deal with it.

You would think that an anthropologist with a Korean heritage would understand the plight of the natives that are governed by unilateral decisions of outsiders.

I honestly think that this is a good choice for Dartmouth in terms of updating and providing necessary services. Is it the best choice? Maybe not, Google would probably have been a better way to go. Still, Dartmouth is partnering with a major software and web-based services company that has made major strides at improving security in the last few years.