Winner of Center for Digital Education's 'Top-10 Digital Community College' chooses Google Apps for students

The institution

Central Piedmont Community College (CPCC) is nationally recognized for its innovation in technology and learning, having won accolades for outstanding contributions in education technology from organizations such as the American Association of Community Colleges. "We actively promote and advocate the use of technology to improve the learning experience," says CIO Malik Rahman. "This includes providing top-notch communication and collaboration tools for students."

Approach

Years ago, CPCC made the commitment to provide lifetime email to all students. As the student and alumni population has grown, so have email bandwidth and storage needs, making it increasingly difficult to deliver on this promise. Since its founding, CPCC has gone from a small college with a dozen programs serving 1,600 students to one with more than 100 degree, diploma, and certificate programs serving approximately 70,000 students. The college has also become a community workforce development resource, offering educational services through area campuses and at many high schools and businesses.

For a number of years, the college ran student email on an internally hosted system. According to Rahman, what the old system lacked in features and storage, it made up for in stability, but "ultimately it was too limiting." With the previous system, students could forward their messages to an off-site location before storing them, so delivery could not be guaranteed. When college leadership decided that email would be the primary means of official communication to students, CPCC's Information Technology Services (ITS) team began looking into other options.

Solution

ITS thoroughly researched open source technologies, commercial software, email appliances and external solutions. The college Technology Advisory committee, consisting of faculty, administration and IT staff, convened to review the possibilities and narrowed down the list to two finalists, both hosted solutions from major corporations.

"Each solution had its advantages and disadvantages," recalls Associate CIO David Kim. "In the end, the Advisory committee unanimously voted for Google Apps for Education." Google provided seamless integration with the existing Active Directory authenticating system, more than 2 GB of email storage and the ability to store messages before forwarding them, thereby ensuring delivery. "Add to this capabilities like Docs and Google Talk, and the advantages of Google Apps were obvious," says Rahman.

After selecting Google Apps Education Edition, the college application architecture team began implementation. Rahman notes that it was vital that Google Apps cleanly integrate with existing systems. Google offered a single sign-on gateway via the SAML protocol that interacted with the college's single sign-on solution. This was a crucial factor in what Rahman describes as "a seamless transition" from internally hosted solutions to the Google-hosted system.

Provisioning current and future student email accounts went smoothly as well. CPCC developed a solution to build email addresses in batches for existing students, quickly generating more than 170,000 accounts. New students automatically receive email addresses the moment they complete their application to the college.

The college then kicked off a marketing campaign with flyers, postcards, email, and web spotlights, highlighting the partnership with Google. "The Google alliance really bumped up student confidence and showed that we are providing the best of the best to students," says Director of Web Development Ken Ingle.

The biggest potential stumbling block was how to migrate more than 30 million email messages to the new system without affecting student email access. Google provided a tool that matched the Google account with the old account and automatically migrated all email to each student's new inbox. "In less than 24 hours, more than 30 million messages were migrated to Gmail with all folder structures maintained through the Google tagging interface," recalls Rahman. "The Google team has been extremely responsive and the migration has been a huge success for the college."

Results

On May 19, 2007, Google Apps went live for students. Gmail has become the college standard for all official student communication. Students have readily adopted Google Talk for interaction with peers, advisors and faculty. Google Docs is accessible to students and its use is rising rapidly. "With Docs, groups of students can work together, retain versions of documents as they progress and access their information at any time and place—it's quickly transforming the learning experience," says Rahman.

As a next step, Rahman and his team are rolling out Google Calendar, including automatic population of student class schedules, academic and special events. "Each service in Google Apps Education Edition provides a unique benefit to our students. At this point, Gmail and the 2GB on-line storage have provided the greatest return for our college community, but the possibilities for enhanced collaboration and communication are virtually endless."

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.