[Infowarrior] - Yale delays switch to Gmail

[Richard Forno]

ITS delays switch to Gmail
By David Tidmarsh
Staff Reporter
Published Tuesday, March 30, 2010

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/university-news/2010/03/30/its-delays-switch-gmail-community-input/
The changeover to Google as Yale’s e-mail provider has been put on hold.

Information Technology Services has decided to postpone the  
University’s move from the Horde Webmail service to Google Apps for  
Education, a suite of communication and collaboration tools for  
universities, pending a University-wide review process to seek input  
from faculty and students. After a series of meetings with faculty and  
administrators in February, ITS officials decided to put the move on  
hold, Deputy Provost for Science and Technology Steven Girvin said.

“There were enough concerns expressed by faculty that we felt more  
consultation and input from the community was necessary,” he said in  
an e-mail to the News.

The idea to switch to Google Apps for Education  — which includes  
popular programs such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs —  
arose during an ITS internal meeting around Christmas, computer  
science professor Michael Fischer said. After ITS notified faculty  
members and administrators of the plan in February, several expressed  
reservations about the move, and ITS officials decided to convene a  
committee to discuss the situation.

Chuck Powell, the ITS senior director of academic media and  
technology, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Several members of the committee thought ITS had made the decision to  
move to Gmail too quickly and without University approval, Fischer said.

“People were mainly interested in technical questions like the  
mechanics of moving, wondering ‘Could we do it?’ ” he said. “But  
nobody asked the question of ‘Should we do it?’ ”

Fischer said concerns about the switch to Gmail fell into three main  
categories: problems with “cloud computing” (the transfer of  
information between virtual servers on the Internet), technological  
risks and downsides, and ideological issues.

Google stores every piece of data in three centers randomly chosen  
from the many it operates worldwide in order to guard the company’s  
ability to recover lost information — but that also makes the data  
subject to the vagaries of foreign laws and governments, Fischer said.  
He added that Google was not willing to provide ITS with a list of  
countries to which the University’s data could be sent, but only a  
list of about 15 countries to which the data would not be sent.

“Yale is an international, multicultural community of scholars,” he  
said. “Students deserve to have rights to their information while on  
campus.”

But even if all data were kept on American soil, Google’s size and  
visibility as a company makes it more susceptible to attack from  
individuals, ranging from hackers to company insiders, Fischer said.

Under the proposed switch, Yale might lose control over its data or  
could seem to endorse Google corporate policy and the large carbon  
footprint left by the company’s massive data centers. In addition,  
Fischer said, Google has a “one size fits all” customer service policy  
for its Google Apps clients, and the creation of a Google  
“monoculture” among e-mail users would cause severe problems when the  
company’s servers experience downtime or crashes.

Deputy Provost Charles Long said last Wednesday that he did not know  
about the committee’s decision but noted that several faculty members  
had concerns about communications security under the proposed Google  
system.

“I thought that students were all on it,” he said. “But there was some  
concern about its capacity to maintain confidentiality with respect to  
regulations.”

ITS plans to propose procedures for getting input from the community  
and making a more informed decision in the coming months, Fischer said.

Originally, ITS had planned to make a gradual transition from Horde to  
Gmail by next spring, moving current freshmen, sophomores and incoming  
students to the new system but giving upperclassmen the option to  
remain with Horde.

But at this point, Fischer estimated, the earliest move to Google Apps  
for Education could be made in spring of next year, with the class of  
2015 being the first to adopt the new system at the beginning of its  
freshman year.

Google has been at the center of a number of recent controversies  
relating to privacy, security and intellectual property issues. The  
introduction of the Google Buzz social networking service in February,  
which automatically allowed Gmail users to view the contacts of  
members in their address books, raised concerns among privacy  
advocates. The company has also come under fire for its censorship of  
search results, most notably in cooperation with the Chinese  
government. Google recently reversed its policy, shutting down its  
Chinese Web site.