Google apps

I'm up at the CLAC conference right now and sat through a very interesting discussion led by Hope college, who ditched their old email system and went totally to Google apps.  A couple of the interesting takeaway points

• Google has detailed terms of use policies which go through privacy, data mining and email ownership issues.  They do *not* own the data or emails- that's up to the given organizations if the person or the college owns it.  They can potentially data mine, but won't report anything identifiable.  A couple of colleges have had counsel look over the contracts and they have no issues with the setup and don't think that it exposes them to any FERPA/HIPPA related issues.
  
• 6 month lead time for changes in policy, so you'll have a bit of warning if they decide to start charging.  Folks using it said they'd be willing to pay anyway- you go back to senior staff and talk about how much money you've already saved
• Search not sort: you have to train your faculty to not throw things away and not to bother sorting into folders.  Google can search them faster
• Delete in gmail really means delete- you *cannot* get it back under any circumstances.  This is by design due to privacy issues
• They can include campus-wide directories for emails
• Calendaring has grown organically at schools using it, to the point it's now the default calendaring system even if there are others available.
• They now have a blackberry connector.
• Gmail will *not* do mass email.  You need to keep some solution for alum and admissions to mass-email folks
• They want folks to move over to Google mail for alums as well- oh, that has ads...

With google docs available as well and all the issues around large scale saving of email (See our SAN issues) I won't be surprised to see more and more people moving to this.

So, how far do you outsource?

Back at my old job I had a server that was devoted to instructional tech- the LMS (Dokeos) ran on it and I also added a bunch of custom apps, mostly written in PHP/MySQL with an occasional bit of Flash thrown in. It was a handy place to host stuff like a Wiki that didn't really need a dedicated home as well as a place to experiment in.

I haven't had that at GBurg and I've sort of missed it. Where can I put little one-off apps, host a wiki, etc? (The Wiki in our LMS, Angel, is not exactly a biug win) But as time's gone on, I've begun to wonder if it's really necessary. Other people are happy to host stuff, and perhaps we really don't need to do much of anything much anymore.

After all, this Blog is hosted: I'm not using the blog tools in our LMS or installing a blog on a server. I ran a survey tool on a machine at my old job: when the company decided to stop free educational licensing I dumped it for an open source product, still hosted. Yet SurveyMonkey is just as good, works for a quick, small survey and if you really need a lot of stuff, it's cheaper than hosting a product yourself. We don't have a good Wiki on campus, but I just pointed a professor at Wikidot for a project they want to use. I could even outsource the entire development environment since I just got an invite to Google App Engine.

I'm not sure I'd want to host anything needing serious security- I've had people do surveys that fell squarely under HIPPA- but for a generic one off it's not so bad. I could worry about losing the company that runs the outsourced server, but in reality that's no worse than when we lost the survey tool at my old job: we still had to migrate all of the data anyway.

So how far do you go?