Google Apps is the implementation of Google applications like Gmail and Docs except customized for a particular domain. It’s pretty cool that they offer all of these features tightly integrated together to pretty much anyone with a domain name who wants them.

The BBC and The Chronicle of Higher Education report that many universities around the world are taking Google up on the offer and implementing Google Apps at their schools.

In Dublin, the news service says, “the addresses and domain name still remain the same — but underneath the bonnet, it’s a service provided by Google.” Trinity College officials say they made the decision to outsource because it let them maintain a robust e-mail system at no additional cost; Google does all the work. 

Arizona State University made the same decision late last year to switch to Gmail, which also comes with a calendar and instant messaging, two items that are very attractive to students. 

My school, the University of California, Berkeley, is not one of these universities. I feel like this is really unfortunate and that the world’s most prominent public university is missing out big time.

The standard UC Berkeley email service, CalMail, offers students, faculty, and staff 250 MB of email storage (the quota until about a month ago was an even more paltry 100 MB). Email through Google Apps would offer more than 2GB of free space for every account. The spam filtering on CalMail similarly only just recently improved from “horrible” to “marginal.” Of course, Gmail’s spam filtering is legendary and very good.

The Google Apps service is completely free as well, including the storage costs, support costs, etc. I wonder how much money that would save a school like UC Berkeley.

Apart from those very tangible benefits, it seems like there would be huge potential for student and faculty collaboration and communication through Google Apps. The Apps include Google’s talk application, meaning that all email addresses would also have the instant message capability. Same thing goes for the Google document relation applications, notebooks, etc.

Obviously I could see a university have strong misgivings about turning over so much of its infrastructure to Google - basically the concern would be “selling out” to a corporation that would data mine users, pitch them ads and do all sorts of “evil” things. The thing is that many individuals already make that choice by signing up for Gmail or another free web-based email service. Obviously there is a huge difference between one person making a choice like that and an institution imposing such a decision on everyone. I wonder, however, what a company like Google, self-desirous of not doing “evil,” would be willing to promise a university in order to gain its adoption of Google Apps. I suspect they might be willing to make a pretty favorable deal.

What Google Apps for education seems to have the potential for solving is the problem of universities with underfunded IT departments and infrastructure. 100 MB of email storage, even the current 250 MB, is ridiculously low. (memo to the university - that unworkably low quota might be a reason why so many students and faculty have their own Gmail accounts already). 100 MB is 50 2 MB PDFs or images, 250 MB is 125 of the same. I know many faculty members and students who send and receive this amount or more of documents in the span of a week or less.

Providing university-wide document sharing, collaboration, chat, etc. capabilities is something not even on the horizon in the current IT planning. The only thing that we have similar is bSpace, Berkeley’s implementation of Sakai, which is great, but is designed for class and project collaboration. A Google Apps implementation would complement that, by proving more advanced collaborative features for students in day to day life (in and outside of the classroom) as well as better supporting ad hoc groupings and sharing.

Something else that Google Apps provides that there is only a half-baked campus equivalent of current is calendar service. Right now, faculty and staff have access to CalAgenda which is an implementation of the Oracle collaboration suite calendar. It works, but it costs the campus (which of course passes on to individual departments) a variety of fees. And it is limited to those signed up. By contrast the Google Apps calendar is tied to an individual’s account, meaning every student, faculty, staff, affiliate, etc. would have a calendar. It seems like in addition to saving money, this sort of universal implementation would cut through quite a few scheduling Gordion knots.

Google and Google Apps have limitations and are certainly not perfect, but I wonder the sort of system they could become for my university if they were implemented here. It seems like Berkeley’s expertise and funds could be used to customize and tailor the Google Apps system to the campus’ needs, while still saving so much money.

I’m also really curious what the response percentage would be if students, faculty and staff were polled on the issue. I suspect that a significant number would support an alternative to the current IT services.

The complete article from The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Wired Campus Blog: Google Mail Takes Over Campuses Worldwide”

The complete article from BBC News: “Google’s Email for Universities”