Danny Gorog25 June 2008, 2:00 PM
The NSW Department of Education makes a bold move and chooses Gmail over Exchange for 1.5 million students.
According to a
report, the NSW
Department of Education and Training has decided to switch 1.5 million
student email accounts from Outlook/Exchange infrastructure to Gmail.
The move is said to be one of the largest private deployments of Gmail
anywhere in the world.
The contract between SMS Management and Consulting (a Gmail partner) and the Government is valued at
$9.5 million but will include input from Telstra and Google who will be
providing a customised version of Gmail to the department.
The CIO of the NSW education department, Stephen Wilson, said that the
'agency had no plans to switch on Google's online word processing
software at this stage' but didn't rule it out in the future.
Google has already been involved in another large Gmail deployment to 68,000 students at Macquarie University.
This story highlights that Microsoft is coming under increasing
pressure by competitors who are beginning to nibble away at its
Exchange cash cow. Anecdotally, many businesses that I talk to forgo
the expense of installing Exchange and maintaining their own email
infrastructure for hosted solutions.
While the 'software-as-a-service' shift is inevitable Microsoft isn't
standing still. There are many providers here in Australia that offer a
'hosted Exchange' solution that provides businesses with all the
facilities of Exchange but without the headache of managing their own
infrastructure.
Hosted Exchange is considerably more expensive than Google Apps at the Enterprise level. The monthly cost of a
premium hosted Exchange account through
Netspace is
$AUD19.95 per mailbox, per month. An equivalent Google Apps Enterprise
account costs $US50 per mailbox per year. Both accounts offer
different features - the Netspace account, for example, offers free mobile email access while the Google account offers more than 10 times the
storage (and also provides full POP3/IMAP access for use with mobile devices).
All these features are free to education users -- Google offers a full product suite to education which effectively gives institutions an unlimited number of email accounts
plus full access to all other Google Apps services like Google Docs,
Spreadsheets and Calendaring.
Is this the Trojan horse Google are riding into Exchange town? What do you think?