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Google Apps Education Edition helped Utah State University upgrade its communication and collaboration technologies without increasing student fees.The institutionFounded in 1888, Utah State University has evolved from a small agricultural college into a school recognized internationally for its intellectual and technological leadership in land, water, space and life enhancement. The university has 850 faculty and more than 23,000 undergraduate and graduate students, including 10,000 enrolled in continuing education programs throughout the state of Utah. With seven colleges, more than 200 majors and 130 research-related classes, Utah State counts six Goldwater Scholars and one Rhodes Scholar among its graduates in the past seven years. ApproachToday, academic excellence requires robust, scalable technology. At Utah State, there was a pressing need to replace outdated systems that lacked contemporary, web-based front ends and that were time-consuming and expensive to support. The school's proprietary email system, for instance, was hosted on a 20-year-old operating system that didn't even allow students to retain email accounts after graduation. "We needed more than just a new email solution," says associate vice president for technology Eric Hawley. "And we had to overcome the outdated 'not invented here' syndrome to help our IT staff understand that their focus should be on strategic enterprise solutions to help us reach our educational objectives, not just overseeing commodities like email." The school was wary of becoming involved with providers that might not survive changing business trends, and was especially mindful of keeping IT overhaul costs minimal to avoid an increase in student fees. "We looked at a number of proprietary and open-source alternatives with an eye for added value - features like shared applications, collaboration, and single sign-on capabilities," says Hawley. Solution
The school involved various stakeholders in the due diligence process before deciding on Google Apps Education Edition as a trusted solution that could provide the most cost-effective feature set, ease of use, economy of space and seamless integration into the university's IT infrastructure. Both the student council and the student senate endorsed resolutions to adopt Google Apps Education Edition on behalf of the entire student body. Students hearing about the new system sent emails of praise to the administration, urging "full speed ahead" and expressing their excitement and appreciation. A beta test of the new system went into effect soon after. The single sign-on integration API ensured a smooth implementation process. Within a month, student beta testers were clamoring for the system to go live. ResultsNow, groups of Utah State students can work collaboratively on documents - editing, revising, and sharing information without emailing attachments back and forth, or worrying about accessing their documents from computers all over campus. They know that the most current version of each document resides securely online. "As each new semester begins, we expect to hear many more real-world success stories of collaborative document sharing and how it enhances the educational experience," says Hawley. When Utah State implemented Gmail at the end of the 2006 academic year, more than 5,000 students opened accounts - accounts that will keep them linked to their alma mater long after they leave. The administration expects that the entire student body will switch over to Gmail within a year, at which point the need to support the old proprietary email system will be eliminated. Today, the university is establishing a marketing and outreach campaign to inform the tens of thousands of campus constituents about the new system - what Google Apps is and what it can do, how to sign up, and opportunities to learn more about how to use the tools. According to Hawley, it would have cost the university in the neighborhood of $800,000 per year to build an email system in-house and support the necessary servers, licenses and storage infrastructure. With Google Apps Education Edition, Utah State gets all this, plus the collaboration benefits of Google Docs. Additionally, with Google Apps Education Edition, IT support overhead has been virtually eliminated. "Had we not gone with the Google solution, we'd be looking at proposing a significant increase in student fees," says Hawley. "This is not something anybody wanted to see happen." About Google Apps Education EditionGoogle 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.
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