Managing Free Email Solutions for Education

 
When educational institutions first began providing student with email accounts, the options were limited – implement an in-house solution from Novell or Microsoft depending on your network infrastructure.  There were some also small players in the market that provided hosted solutions. The problems with these options were they were expensive, required resources to set-up and maintain and had an ongoing costs associated with them.

About 5 years ago, Google, as they so often do, upset the proverbial apple cart by giving free email accounts to the educational space. Not to be outdone, Microsoft soon followed up with Live@edu and then Office 365 for Education. Both of these offerings eliminated the requirement for schools and colleges to purchase and maintain hardware for email and also eliminated the need for licensing of Exchange or GroupWise.

 One of the initial shortfalls with these offerings was the common fact that there was not an easy way to manage accounts in bulk. They did provide an interface that allowed for “one off” account creation and management, but with the large influx and outflow of students that the typical school or college is faced with each semester, the task can be daunting at best. One recent college I spoke with shared that when they first deployed Google Apps, they spent nearly 300 man hours keying in data, and they only had about 5,000 student accounts to create. Extrapolating this out, they could anticipate spending 3.6 minutes per account, or 75 hours per year, managing email accounts - assuming 1/4th of their students matriculate annually.

Further complicating these deployments was the fact that there was no easy way to synchronize passwords between the network account and the emails account.  It was easy to set the initial password as identical but, as is often the case, the user is required to change the password upon initial login. This frequently resulted in 2 different passwords – one for the network and one for email – causing a large number of calls to the helpdesk for password resets in one or both systems.
Fortunately, vendors that specialize in Identity and Access Management stepped in quickly to fill the void. Software tools were made available to allow IT staff to extend their automated user account provisioning to include both the Google Apps and Office 365 environments.  By utilizing these connectors, the amount of time to manage an account went form 3.6 minutes to virtually zero.  As the solutions offered by Google and Microsoft provide email accounts “for life”, it is important to have procedures in place that insure the email accounts remain active, and possibly moved to an alumni folder, upon student graduation.  This needs to occur even when the network access account has been deleted.

Another feature available from software vendors was a password synch tool. Anytime a user changed a password in their network account, the new entry was immediately passed to the mail account, insuring consistency and a significant reduction in calls to the helpdesk.  Extending this one step further is providing a self-service reset password application whereby the student can rest a forgotten password based on challenge questions.   This reset password can also be synched to the email solution, once again insuring consistency.

Summary
While the email offerings provided by Google and Microsoft are free, the time required to set-up and manage thousands of student and faculty accounts can be overwhelming and expensive. Fortunately, cost effective solutions are commercially available to reduce or eliminate the burden placed on the IT staff by automating the user and email account lifecycle.


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