Google May Host FAS Webmail

Often accused of attempting to conquer the world, technological titans Google and Microsoft may be taking over a university Webmail interface near you.

Both companies have started education sector initiatives aimed at convincing universities to switch over to their own Web-based products, such as e-mail hosting and calendars.

Associate Dean for Internet Technology Larry M. Levine said that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) will be exploring outside e-mail hosting options in the coming months as FAS works to “refurbish and upgrade the central FAS e-mail system.”

“If Harvard would like [Google’s] services, we would be happy to provide them,” said Rajen Sheth, a product manager at Google.

Google has “hundreds of schools” signed up for its ”Apps for Education” program, which supplies Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Talk customized to the schools’ specifications, according to Sheth.

Microsoft’s platform, “Windows Live @edu,” is currently being used by five universities, and 57 institutions have enrolled worldwide, according to Nikki Reed, a spokeswoman for Microsoft.

Major selling points in the companies’ pitches are larger inboxes for students—both Microsoft and Google offer more than 2GB of storage space—and interfaces that are more user-friendly than usual university Webmail systems. Harvard students with FAS e-mail accounts are currently allotted 40MB of inbox space.

The e-mail addresses, which would continue beyond graduation, would still bear the .edu suffix as well as the university’s domain name, both companies say.

In the Ivy League, the University of Pennsylvania has been in talks with the two companies since last spring and will be selecting a vendor shortly, according to Penn’s executive director of Computing and Educational Technology Services, Ira Winston.

The pilot program, which will replace Penn’s in-house Webmail system in addition to offering other Web products, will launch in the spring, Winston said.

“E-mail has become a commodity service and there are a number of providers who have a free service that is higher quality and more reliable than the comparable services offered by Penn and other universities,” Winston wrote in an e-mail.

Students at Penn complain about frequent shutdowns and lack of server space.

“[Penn’s Webmail] really sucks,” said Penn sophomore Irmina A. Gawlas. “I get an e-mail every day saying I’m over my disk quota.”

Both Google and Microsoft claim that the current versions of their program packages are free, though Microsoft requires that institutions use their identity data management system.

Google’s fine print reads that the free offer extends only to those schools that enroll during the beta trial period.

Harvard’s Levine, however, said that he has privacy concerns if off-campus servers were used to store data.

Levine also said that he would want to ensure that FAS retained legal rights if the government were to seek access to an individual’s e-mail.

But Sheth, the project manager at Google, said in an e-mail that “Google treats security and privacy of all users as paramount.”

“Google abides by local and federal laws for release of information—just as Harvard would if the data was on local servers. The data is no more at risk than if it was stored locally,” Sheth added.

Mark E. Baran ’10, who has been a private IT and e-mail network consultant for the past five years, said that Harvard’s current Webmail system was sound from a technological standpoint, but needed to be made more user-friendly through a redesign.

“We need a designer to come in and make our current e-mail system less fugly,” he said.