Arizona State University's campus hosts a satellite office of the megadotcom Google. Last year the company took over the task of maintaining ASU's more than 60,000 faculty, student and staff email accounts. The accounts look and act like ASU accounts - but they're really just Gmail accounts in disguise. And campus citizens can access Google's calendar and instant messaging applications as well.
Cost to ASU? $0.00.
I asked Jeff Holeman, the ASU Alumni Association's Director of Communications: when will Google take over the alumni e-mail accounts at ASU? It seems inevitable. And it's a wake-up call to the software providers which have had a near monopoly on alumni sites until now. One such company's CEO recently told me that the online community software market "has become increasingly price competitive, and I don't like it."
Jeff acknowledged that alumni e-mail addresses are "a challenge and a priority," and that ASU will likely move the alumni accounts to Gmail in the near future:
Once the proper authentication system is in place, users could theoretically access other [Google] applications. Some might be a benefit of membership. And there are many possible ways to integrate additional destinations such as the campus online store, or the libraries.
"The University," Jeff says, "has the capacity to do a lot in-house." This means a partnership between the Association and campus IT staff, something he says is already happening.
ASU currently offers e-mail forwarding to alumni, but not e-mail accounts with mailbox storage on a server. The Google partnership will mean:
- An asu.edu (Gmail) address for all alumni;
- Students will no longer lose their asu.edu account upon graduation;
- All users with a Gmail ASU account can access the other Google applications.
But wait - before you call Google to request alumni email services for your campus, check out Microsoft's newest offering: Windows Live@edu. How long before Yahoo follows suit and offers free (or near-free) branded e-mail systems to campus and alumni associations as well?
These giant companies will easily absorb or by-pass the existing online community software vendors we all know and do business with. Our campus IT staffs will be happy if we can (relatively) easily deliver the giants' free services to alumni wrapped in our school's brand: photo and video sharing, search engines, blogging, calendars, instant messaging, and even online word processing or spreadsheet editing.
And here's a news flash: almost all these services are really just giant databases on the back end, so we can also assume that our online alumni directories and alumni social networks will be powered by Google or a similar engine very soon.
- What are the positive and negative repercussions of this?
- How can these opportunities help us in our mission - and at what cost?