Macquarie Uni goes Gmail for staff

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 12 January 2010 08:26

Your IT - Home IT

There's a trend for universities to ditch in-house mail servers for student and alumni accounts in favour of hosted services offered by Microsoft or Google. But Macquarie University is the first in Australia to put its staff on Gmail.

Macquarie was the first Australian university to provide students with Gmail accounts, and now it is the first to extend that to research, teaching and administrative staff.

A four-stage rollout of 6000 accounts will occur between January and September.

The reason? Cost, and the high levels of student satisfaction with Gmail.

"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," said Vice-Chancellor Steven Schwartz.

"That's money we would much prefer to spend on better teaching and research facilities for our staff and students, or on scholarships enabling students from disadvantaged backgrounds to access a university education," he added.

CIO Marc Bailey said the move to Gmail would provide staff with 100 times the email storage space they were used to.

Please read on to find out what else he had to say.