“The idea is that Ohio State needs to give its students a great e-mail service,” said Kate Christobek, president of Undergraduate Student Government.
OSU has recently issued a request for proposals for a third party to provide the school with e-mail service, said John Ellinger, director of operations for the Office of Information Technologies. OSU will select a company when all of the bids come back, but Ellinger said Google and Microsoft seem to be the front-runners.
The service selected to write a contract with OSU will be providing its services for free, Ellinger said, and most likely will not receive additional income.
Ellinger said students’ main apprehension about including a third party is preserving their e-mail addresses.
“You will always have the [email protected]. We’ll take that mail and forward it to this new account at this third-party site,” he said.
Discussions on outsourcing began in June after Christobek and Dave Boley, Council of Graduate Students president, approached him, Ellinger said.
“It was a question we had raised a year earlier but had not had much traction on,” he said.
Outsourcing OSU’s e-mail service, Ellinger said, will provide more accommodative features, such as two gigabytes of storage capacity – as compared to the current 15 megabytes available – and the ability to access e-mail from personal devices like a PDA.
Finding a contract with a third party is the most economical solution for OSU, Ellinger said. Trying to improve the school’s central system is too costly, and the improvements that could be made would still not meet standards set by other services, he said.
Transferring all 57,000 mailboxes to another service could take four to six months, Ellinger said. Students will be broken down into groups of 500 to 1,000, which will receive an instructional e-mail orienting them with the new system.
David Beyer, an undecided freshman, said he does not think using a third party will greatly impact student satisfaction.
“I don’t know if it would make much more of a difference,” he said. “I don’t know if there would be much of a change that people would notice.”
Beyer said he forwards his messages to a Gmail account and has never logged onto OSU webmail.
Christobek also forwards her messages to a Gmail account, but said she thinks this change will enhance students’ communication capabilities.
“I know it will be a great thing for students,” she said. “It eliminates one more hassle to go through. It will provide students with a great starting point when they get here.”
Allison D’Aurora can be reached at [email protected].
