page 2 wants gmail!

3/24/2009 2:12:04 PM

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/whats-the-point-of-running.ars

Quote :

"Only four freshmen showed up at the University of Virginia in 2007 without a computer of their own, and the school has decided that it's no longer worth the expense of running campus computer labs."

3/27/2009 10:43:26 AM

What's embarassing about the pilot initiative is that there are 30,000+ student accounts at the university, and the PDF shows there were only about 288 accounts made for the Google pilot and 195 for the Live pilot.

3/27/2009 11:18:23 AM

So you'd have preferred they waste tons of time and expense opening the pilot to thousands of users who couldn't be bothered to write a report afterword anyway? Yeah, that's a good idea. It was a feature test, nothing more. They are already assuming the Google and MS have the scale figured out and that doesn't need to be evaluated.

3/27/2009 12:11:43 PM

I've taken the comments made to date and compiled them for the computer committee.

3/27/2009 1:24:11 PM

What computer committee?

3/27/2009 2:45:20 PM

The PAMS computer affairs committee that makes recommendations to OIT and the administration at both the college and university level.

[Edited on March 27, 2009 at 2:51 PM. Reason : ]

3/27/2009 2:48:00 PM

as for email: i've used email forwarding to gmail for about 3 years now and haven't looked back.

3/27/2009 3:13:36 PM

Quote :

"So you'd have preferred they waste tons of time and expense opening the pilot to thousands of users who couldn't be bothered to write a report afterword anyway? Yeah, that's a good idea. It was a feature test, nothing more. They are already assuming the Google and MS have the scale figured out and that doesn't need to be evaluated."

Uh... calm down there, ace.

I'd prefer that if they're going to have a pilot to evaluate the feature-set that they find a way to get more than 1% of the potentially affected audience to participate. Student e-mail is kind of a big deal.

Then again, letting an insignificantly small group of people decide for a larger group seems to be how the University settled on GroupWise, so obviously it's got a proven track record of excellence as a philosophy.

[Edited on March 27, 2009 at 3:22 PM. Reason : .]

3/27/2009 3:21:26 PM

3/27/2009 3:36:35 PM

^^I'd bet >90% of the student body doesn't give a damn if it's Google or Microsoft and wouldn't participate in the test run if given a choice to do so.

They'll use whatever the university says they will, and if they don't like it, they'll forward it to whatever crappy email solution they swear by.

3/27/2009 3:43:56 PM

I agree. I just think if you're going to have a pilot, you should at least try to get a decent amount of people in on it. Otherwise just send down the mandate and be done with it.

3/27/2009 3:48:21 PM

Quote :

"...wouldn't participate in the test run if given a choice to do so..."

All students were given the choice to participate. So I guess that settles that point.

3/27/2009 5:42:50 PM

^^ there's a difference between a pilot and an evaluation. this was an evaluation, as i understand it. a pilot is a limited roll-out of the mostly-finished product.

3/27/2009 11:47:25 PM

Touché.

Actually I think you'd find they decided on Groupwise based on a committee of 7 people, 4 of which were entrenched GW users/admins. Then they made their target change every time the system didn't work out the way they wanted it to.

It's going to be integrated calendar and email for everyone.
No, wait, it's going to be just calendar for everyone.
No, it's just going to be calendar for faculty and staff.
OK maybe just staff currently in Oracle calendar.
Ad nauseum.

3/30/2009 9:04:23 AM

Quote :

"^^ there's a difference between a pilot and an evaluation. this was an evaluation, as i understand it. a pilot is a limited roll-out of the mostly-finished product."

It was called a pilot in every piece of literature I've seen about it, including the PDF linked on the last page.

3/30/2009 9:31:18 AM

^ I guess I understood the definitions better than they did. It's not like you don't expect this from OIT anymore.

3/30/2009 9:39:19 AM