Monday, August 18th, 2008...4:55 am - Peter Giles
Education Cooking with Google Apps
The NSW Education Department is now among Google’s biggest gmail clients after they recently signed up for the service. A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the NSW Education deal is one of the biggest deployments of gmail in the world. You can read the article here. Macaquarie University has also reportedly signed a gmail deal with Google going the way of many US universities who have outsourced their email services. The education sector is notoriously conservative and security conscious with web and email services, particularly where under 18’s are involved. It just goes to show that it doesn’t make any sense for many organisations to go it alone with mail services anymore, nor office applications for that matter. Who has the scale in their own IT Departments to keep up with the complexities of the internet that Google makes its daily business? It’ll be intersting watching Google and Microsoft slog it out for the education market. My bet’s on Google unless we see some pretty stunning innovation from Microsoft in cloud computing.
1 Comment
August 21st, 2008 at 2:39 pm
I still think the biggest hurdle to overcome with corporations and academia using ‘cloud’ services will be trust in confidentiality - for some reason there is still the perception if it is not locked down on a series of drives in a physical room in the ‘campus’ then anyone can get to it. Of course as we know anything, once it is digital, can move. One thing I am looking forward too is true creative collaborative tools (vs just email and office etc:) - A.viary have an interesting suite (free and easy) vs something like Adobe Suite (expensive and not so…)?
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