George Fox University Switches to Gmail

When Arizona State University started using Gmail in 2007, it prompted chief information officers (CIOs) across the country to discuss the risks of outsourcing e-mail, said Greg Smith, CIO at Oregon's George Fox University. 

“Early on I think we were all kind of shocked when Arizona State made the first big move," he said, "and it created a lot of debate.”

He, along with the other CIOs in the NorthWest Academic Computing Consortium, debated whether the benefits outweighed the risks, which involved someone else controlling their e-mail. Would that compromise sensitive university information? At the time, Smith didn't want to outsource e-mail at his university because the debate wasn't worth the battle.

But three years later, George Fox University decided to go with Gmail. And on Tuesday, The IT team will finish the migration of 6,000 to 7,000 student, faculty and staff e-mail accounts from the Microsoft Exchange system to Google's Gmail.

Smith's approach differs from that of many universities that just move students over to Gmail without giving faculty and staff the same option. It was all or nothing for them: They wanted the faculty and students to communicate with the same tools.

“I think if you have an institution that truly integrates the community, the students need to be a part of the same system,” Smith said.

The move will save about $50,000 annually in hardware and administrative labor costs. And with 7 gigabytes of e-mail storage space, each user will have 14 times more space than the current system provides.

The university already had been using Google Apps for Education for a year, but hadn't enabled Gmail because of lingering security and legal questions. Now Smith doesn't have any concerns about the security or privacy of university information, unlike the University of California at Davis, which decided this past month to halt its Gmail pilot for faculty and staff. 

“I would say I have as good a university security as you could put together for an institution of our size, but it pales in comparison to what Google has to do,” Smith said. "And their simple statement is that ‘the customer data that we take care of will adhere to the same security standards that we maintain for all Google data.’”

While some institutions say they don't want to switch because their faculty might be sharing sensitive information, Smith said the faculty are going to share and collaborate anyway. They just need to be educated so they know what should not be shared over the Internet.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s your e-mail system or someone else’s e-mail system," he said. "There’s some basic things you just don’t do.”