Google Apps Education Edition allows private university reallocate precious resources to higher purposes

The Institution

Two preachers walked into a meeting. One said to the other "Let's build a school in West Texas." The result of that conversation in 1903 is Abilene Christian University (ACU). Today, ACU is a national leader in Christian higher education that attracts 4,700-plus students from nearly every state and 60 nations to its beautiful 280-acre Texas campus. Academic programs include business, pre-med, theatre, physics, journalism, psychology, and education.

Approach

Chief Information Officer Kevin Roberts and his team are responsible for making the most out of every dollar the university spends on technology. While the school's existing email system provided basic service, it lacked advanced functionality and was time-consuming and expensive to maintain. "We were disenchanted with our current email system," says Roberts. "Then the department's email administrator position became vacant, and that added even more urgency to our search for a new solution." Roberts solidified plans to move to an alternative solution that would provide communication and collaboration services at lower costs than the school's outdated system. The school had already investigated, tested and been impressed with Google Apps Education Edition, having compared it against various server-based and hosted solutions. Roberts and staff zeroed in.

"It sounded too good to be true," says Roberts. "There had to be a catch." It seemed a golden opportunity was at hand for the school to "get out of the email business" and reallocate resources toward developing new applications that would provide additional functionality to the school overall. "Our legacy email system required a lot of care and feeding as well as a full-time administrator," he says. The system servers were outdated, expensive to maintain, and were running out of space. Roberts had resigned himself to providing the most basic email services, knowing that the best he could do was to keep the outdated system running, forgoing innovative communication add-ons. "When we saw the tremendous functionality Google Apps included, the skeptic in me was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Could we really save all those dollars and get a better system?" recalls Roberts.

Director of Web Integration and Programming James Langford and his team had been testing Google Apps on an internal domain and came to the same conclusion. "Almost every technology decision we make involves tradeoffs, weighing the operational costs against the benefits gained. Sometimes of course the costs outweigh the benefits and we don't implement the technology. In other cases, the benefits clearly warrant the costs. With Google Apps, the balance sheet is very lopsided. The benefits are tremendous and costs are few," says Langford.

Solution

According to Roberts and Langford, the decision to migrate to Google Apps was "painfully easy." After consulting extensively with faculty, students, and the administration, the consensus was that it made absolute sense to hitch ACU's wagon to the Google star. The majority of ACU users were already familiar with the Google interface and expressed strong faith in the Google brand. "I really had no convincing to do," says Roberts. At the end of the day, it was agreed that Google had delivered a better solution than any other provider.

"As we looked around for alternatives, we considered both open source and commercial software packages, including some that were sold as appliances, as well as commercial, hosted services," explains Langford. "We found fine offerings in all these areas, but none that came close to matching Google's combination of features, reliability and cost. I mention cost last on purpose: while low cost was attractive to us, we were really looking for a way to give our students and employees applications that were best of breed."

ACU moved forward with a campus-wide "GDay is Coming" marketing campaign, which included t-shirts, video tutorials about how to migrate email accounts, and lawn posters. Within 24 hours of adoption, more than 3,000 users on campus had switched over to Gmail. "The adoption rate was astounding," says Roberts. "Training and support costs were zero. People were instant messaging all day long the first day. Essentially, adoption was an organic explosion."

Results

The first day ACU turned on Google Apps, more than 3,000 students and employees opted in. "Within a few months, we turned off the old mail server and considered the migration complete," says Langford. "Everyone on our campus uses Google Apps. Add to this the campus users who study in our online degree program, ACU Worldwide, those who have been accepted to ACU but are not yet on campus, and those who have graduated in the last year, and the total is over 10,000."

In addition to the advantages of Gmail, the biggest productivity gain has been with Google Docs, explains Roberts. The use of Docs is gaining popularity among students, and is already a mainstay for administrators. "People who take meeting notes are sharing the proceedings when the meeting is adjourned," says Roberts. "This may not sound like a big deal, but in a campus environment, it's a huge savings in time, effort, and paper use."

Roberts notes that CIOs in higher education constantly struggle with allocating resources to serve a 365-day, always-on customer base. By outsourcing email to Google, his department has saved an entire full-time position. "We did not need to replace our email administrator," he says. "I was able to reallocate those funds toward a higher level developer position. That's huge in a department where FTEs are a precious commodity."

Langford adds that one of the most obvious and quantifiable benefits has been freeing up of hardware. "We have already turned off, or will turn off in the coming months, multiple email, LDAP and spam filtering servers. "We have been able to cancel contracts for spam and virus protection, licensing for software we no longer use and support and maintenance contracts for both software and hardware," says Langford. "In addition, we freed up considerable time—from a few minutes a day to whole days, depending on the nature of the tasks to be done. No more updates in the wee hours of the morning. Add to these benefits the reduction of stress of employees and users alike, and it's a considerable benefit."

Concludes Roberts, "Not only am I pleasantly surprised at how enthusiastically the campus embraced Google Apps, I wonder why everyone in the world isn't doing this."

About Google Apps Education Edition

Google Apps Education Edition is a free suite of hosted communication & collaboration applications designed for schools and universities. Google Apps includes Gmail (webmail services), Google Calendar (shared calendaring), Google Talk (instant messaging and voice over IP), Google Docs (online document creation & sharing) and a Start Page for creating a customizable homepage on a specific domain, as well as administrative tools, customer support, and access to APIs to integrate Google Apps with existing IT systems.


...or to learn more, sign up for an online seminar.