Novell responds to the Macquarie Uni Gmail conversion

David Heath
Thursday, 14 January 2010 09:16

IT Industry - Strategy

Announcements were made a couple of days ago that Macquarie University was discarding its corporate GroupWise email infrastructure in favour of one provided by Google's Gmail.  Novell responds to the reasons offered for the change.

As iTWire reported recently, Macquarie University has been running its 68,000 student email accounts via Gmail for some time now; however commencing in the near future, 6,000 staff email accounts will also be migrated to the Gmail platform.

Other reports suggested that the University was clearly unhappy with the GroupWise offering.  Vive Chancellor Steven Schwartz was quoted as saying "We were spending a significant amount of money each year maintaining our own inferior email infrastructure that, despite our best efforts, was falling further and further behind staff expectations each year."

Oddly this seems to contradict comments made in the blog of the University CIO (Marc Bailey) suggesting that after an upgrade to the network infrastructure, the GroupWise system was working well.

iTWire invited Richard Price, Novell's Sales Director for Australia and New Zealand to respond to Schwartz' criticisms.  He said, "Novell GroupWise is a world-class product with more than 30 million users in 120 countries around the globe.  It is a secure, trusted and proven e-mail and collaboration solution. The latest version of GroupWise 8 includes interactive Web 2.0 dashboards, rich e-mail functionality and robust calendar management capabilities all delivered securely.

"There are significant costs to migrating, training and securing Google Apps.  In addition, independent financial data showed that the new system will actually cost more, not less.

"However, as a valued customer, Novell will continue to offer our world-class support to the Macquarie University during the transition."

There are, however significant differences in the email requirements of students and staff at a university.  Whereas students simply require an address for which they can send and receive class-oriented materials (probably including assessment submissions), staff have considerably more varied and complex requirements.

At the very least, staff at the university, like in any commercial organisation, need robust calendaring and resource scheduling, they need to be able to proxy email accounts (so the Vice-chancellor's PA can manage his affairs) and they need a variety of complex email addressing and grouping features; all of which are best presented in an internally-hosted email environment.