University of Notre Dame on Google Apps Education Edition

MALE SPEAKER: And I'd like to thank Katie Rose from the
University of Notre Dame.
She will help present this Google Apps
at Notre Dame webinar.
She's the program manager for Enterprise Initiatives over at
Notre Dame.
And she will talk about how they evaluated Google Apps,
how they implemented Google Apps, and eventually what were
the result that they saw.
I'm sure you guys have a lot of questions for Katie, so I
would highly encourage you guys to go to the moderator
page link that we sent in the webinar invite.
Over there, you'll be able to see other questions that some
of the other participants of this webinar
had written as well.
You can vote on those questions as well as enter
your new questions.
And if you have questions about Google Apps, please use
the Q&A block in the bottom right of the screen.
That's where you can ask questions to Cindy and me, and
as the presentation is going on, we will help answer any
questions about Google Apps.
But like I mentioned, if you have questions about the
implementation at Notre Dame, please use the moderator link
that we sent out.
We're going to remind you again in the chat
what that link is.
By the way, this presentation is being recorded.
And I know a lot of you are interested in getting this
presentation in a hard copy format.
And we'll be happy to email that to you guys, along with
the recording as well, which will be on our website.

And if you have more questions after this presentation,
please go to our website at www.google.com/a/edu.
We will remind you what that URL is again.
But that's where you can go to get more information about
Google Apps.
With that, let me hand it over to Katie to walk us through
their implementation and the results that they
saw at Notre Dame.
KATIE ROSE: Hi.
As they said, my name is Katie Rose.
I was the lead for our Google Apps implementation here at
Notre Dame.
My contact information is on the first slide, if you have
other questions after the presentation, as well as the
link to our Google information page here at Notre Dame.
For those of you who don't know much about Notre Dame,
we're located in South Bend, Indiana.
We were founded in 1842 by a priest of the holy cross.
And the University mission focuses on teaching and
learning and research, as well as service.
And all of that is permeated with the Catholic character
that the University was founded with.
We have roughly 10,000 undergraduate students, 2,000
grad students, and approximately 5,000 faculty
and staff, so a pretty decently sized campus for the
midwest.
Before we moved to Google Apps, we obviously were on
another system.
And, last spring, we were experiencing a variety of
different issues, the most important of which was that
our students were very dissatisfied
with our legacy system.
They had very small email quotas,
right around 100 megabytes.
The web mail product that we were using ran so slowly that
it could take them literally up to a minute to log into it,
and it was very outdated.
They didn't have an integrated calendaring system
that they could use.
The systems we had didn't work well with any mobile devices.
And we were starting to experience severe service
degradation, because the system we were
on was quite outdated.
In addition to that, the vendor that we were using at
the time decided that they wanted to "end of life" parts
of our infrastructure in December of 2008.
So, we knew that we had a very tight deadline sitting in
front of us that we really needed to
make a change to handle.

So why did we go to Google Apps?
The first thing we did was we actually talked to both the
students and then talked within the OIT about what we
wanted in a new system.
We knew that we wanted to keep everybody's addresses @nd.edu,
which is the current format we've been using, because we
didn't want to have to re-educate students as well as
the rest of faculty and staff on campus about how to
communicate with the students.
We wanted to make sure that students had a
lot more email storage.
We wanted to be able to provide them an integrated
calendar system.
We knew it needed to be highly available, because of the
complaints we were getting every time we
had a service outage.
We knew we needed a much better webmail client.
Something that could log them in quickly as well as provide
a lot more functionality than that older client did.
We also wanted them to be able to use
this from any platform--
Windows, Mac, Linux.
And we knew that with the wealth of smartphones and PDAs
that students were starting to bring onto campus, that we
needed really strong mobile support so that they could get
to all of those services from their phones.
We also wanted something that was very easy to implement,
because we knew we had such a tight time line.
And we didn't want to lose any of the existing
features that we had.
We already supplied email forwarding, auto-reply.
We filtered for spam.
We checked for viruses.
We had some ways to handle phishing scams. So we didn't
want to lose any of that.
And then, of course, if there were extra things with the
system, that would of course be a bonus.
So, when we looked at what we could do to decide what to go
with, we heavily weighted our choice on what the students
were telling us they wanted.
And we knew that because they were calling the help desk
saying, can't you get us on Google?
And in addition to that, the student government campaigns
in the spring of 2008 all decided to include as part of
their platforms moving student emails to Google services.
Whether they had the ability to do that or not, they
decided that that was a mission they
wanted to take on.
We also had statistics from our legacy system that showed
that, when students chose to forward their Notre Dame email
somewhere else, and we saw a growing number of students
starting to do that, they forwarded it to Google 10
times more than any other services combined.
So we knew that Google was really the most popular choice
for the students.
In addition to that, from our perspective, the Google system
made it far easier for us to maintain an @nd.edu address
for everyone.
They guaranteed us uptime.
They support an incredibly wide array of browsers.
You can still use an email program that you want to use
locally on the desktop if that's what you want.
You can have a variety of languages easily supported.
It works on Windows, Mac, Linux, almost any mobile phone
you can come up with and any other, kind of, out there OS
that somebody might be using.
Their APIs and their open standards made it very easy
for us to start getting hooked in with their system and
implement it.
The virus and spam and phishing protection that they
provided was actually doing better via our testing than
our local system was doing.
And besides that, it gave email and calendar.
But it also gave us Google Docs and Google
Sites and chat utilities.
And in addition to that, there was going to be a cost
savings, because the Google Apps service is offered to
educational institutions at no cost. And it would actually
decrease the amount of staff time we were having to spend
managing email.

So, after we made the decision in OIT that Google was
definitely the best option, hands down.
We then had to go out to the rest of campus and talk to the
rest of the University leadership about what we
wanted to do.
So we met with Student Affairs, and the
administrative leadership, the academic leadership, and
general council.
And we sat down with them and actually gave them some test
accounts, walked them through using the system, and showed
them just exactly what students would have at their
disposal so that they could understand what we were
actually telling them.
And I think that was a really key point in getting their
sign-off to move students to Google.
When they saw it and could actually touch it and play
around with it, they understood why the students
were asking for it and why it was the right
move for us to make.
So once they signed off, we finally could tell students
that we were going to be delivering exactly what they
asked us for.
Implementing the solution actually was one of the
easiest parts of the project.
Believe it or not, our contract negotiations took a
little shy of one month to do, which here at Notre Dame is
incredibly fast. We were shocked at how easy that was
to accomplish.

And obviously, there were no costs to provide email
services for faculty, staff, students and alumni.
The faculty, staff and students didn't have to deal
with any advertisements.
And the one discussion point that we had throughout the
contract negotiations was how security, privacy, FERPA,
other types of laws, would be handled.
And that was all easily handled through the contract.
Google was incredibly easy to work with, with what we needed
to see in those contracts.
So that really went through with a slam dunk here, and we
were just all shocked.
The technology integration was also easy.
The single @nd.edu mail domain for everyone allowed students
on Google and our faculty and staff that are on an in-house
service to still only use that @nd.edu address, and yet get
their mail in the appropriate location.
We do that by hosting the MX records for Notre Dame, here
on campus, as well as mail routing.
And then, authentication is also handled here at Notre
Dame, using the APIs that Google provided.
When students set up their account or when they change
their password, it actually synchronizes their Notre Dame
password to the Google service, so that they can use
the same password to access everything.

Our initial rollout started when the contract got signed,
on April 30 last year.
And within two weeks, we had provisioned over 2,000
accounts for the incoming freshman class
for the fall of 2008.
And they actually start using those accounts in May.
Our First Year of Studies Office starts communicating
with them via email right away.
So we saw a huge uptake in those accounts immediately.
And we also saw a decrease in the number of calls we got to
our help desk about email service at Notre Dame, because
incoming students were already so
familiar with Google services.
And in addition to that, Google's support pages and the
other information they provided through the
implementation and deployment pack made it really easy for
us to get documentation set up and out to the students, so
that they knew how to do what they needed to do.
Over the summer--
oh, typo in my presentation--
over summer 2008, we communicated and marketed the
service to the existing students that would
return in the fall.
We probably could have actually rolled out the Google
service to them right about the same time we rolled it out
to the incoming freshman class.
But because so many students were caught up in finals right
around May 15th, or had already left campus, and we
don't tend to have a large summer population here at
Notre Dame, we opted to wait until they returned in the
fall to switch them over to Google email, because we
wanted to make sure that we really had a chance to tell
them that there was a big change coming.
So we spent the summer preparing them, getting them
excited about the new service, and on the night of September
3rd, we switch over 12,000 email accounts from our legacy
system to Google.
And essentially, we did that by flipping the switch for
their mail routing in our directory system.
So it was almost instantaneous.
They didn't lose any mail.
And the students had the option to import any old mail
that they had in the legacy system into Gmail, using
Gmail's built in fetch utility.
So we didn't even have to worry about migrating their
old mail for them.
We left that up to them.

Most of the work involved in implementation actually went
into the communication and marketing of the service.
Google's deployment pack was fantastic.
It gave us sample emails, sample websites, sample news
articles and advertisements that we could use.
And we made use of all of them.
We customized them easily for Notre Dame, so that it was
relevant to our particular institution, but it really
gave us a great starting point.
In addition to that, we partnered with the incoming
student government, the student body president, and he
had actually created a technology committee on his
government.
So when we started talking with them, they actually came
up with some great ideas about how to involve students in
getting things going.
We had a small pilot group from the student government
technology committee that got into the service early and
started thinking about what they could tell their own
committee members, as well as the rest of the student body,
about the service.
And they started sending out their own emails and
advertisements about Google Apps coming to Notre Dame.
And overall, the communication and marketing plan was really
successful, because 97% of our students knew what was going
to come and didn't have any problems
when we made the change.
We know that 3% did because they called our help desk.
And, as soon as we reminded them, hey, your email switched
tonight, they went, oh yeah, I forgot about that.
So we actually had a really, really easy
time making that switch.
Our marketing campaign was actually quite involved.
We started at the beginning of May, shortly after the
contract was signed, by letting students know that we
were going to be switching them to Google Apps.
We sent an email.
We updated our campus portal mail channel to include an
advertisement and news about the change.
And we also had an article in the student newspaper right
before it ended publication for the year.
In June, we sent them another email update, and we posted a
feature article on our website.
And then, in July, we sent them another email update to
make sure that they were staying abreast of what was
happening throughout the summer.
And then, in August, as they were starting to return and
coming back to campus, we sent multiple emails.
We had posters and banners all over campus.
We had another observer article
in the student newspaper.
We had ads there.
And then, we had yet another website article and posted
additional information on the website as well.
In September, the night we switched over, obviously, we
really hounded them with a lot of emails.
We also had table tents, which are kind of little papers that
get stuck on the table in the dining halls and in the
Student Center.
We had additional posters and banners and ads
in the student newspaper.
And we also started marketing an upcoming Google Apps Bus
visit for campus.
So this really started to grab the students' attention.
They couldn't get away from it, no matter where they were.
We made sure they were seeing something Google.
And then the student organizations, as they started
to get going in early September, also started using
Google Apps for their email and calendars, which further
advertised the service for students' personal use.
In October, the Google Apps Bus visit made a stop here at
Notre Dame, which also helped bring a lot of
notice to the service.
And students were able to stop by the bus, learn some more
about the applications other than Gmail, and kind of get to
know Google a little better.
And it actually resulted in quite a bit more students
starting to use the calendar and docs and sites.
So we really, we were happy to have the Google Bus stop by,
and we hope they'll come back again.

So after rollout, it was actually a huge success.
And we know this for two big reasons.
It increased student satisfaction, and it decreased
our calls to the help desk.
And it actually did that by quite a lot.
Student satisfaction increased by 36%.
Annually, here at Notre Dame, we do a satisfaction survey of
the entire campus.
And we obviously break it out by primary affiliation.
And we ask them about specific services.
And so one of the key services we always ask about is email.
And we saw a huge jump in the satisfaction for email service
at Notre Dame compared to the legacy system and then moving
to Google Apps.
The support calls in the help desk, as well, decreased.
And we obviously keep ongoing stats about the number of
calls to the help desk and what we're
getting calls about.
And that, really, it pleased our help desk a lot.
It made their job a lot easier not having to answer a lot of
questions about email.
Other benefits that we found after we moved to Google.
We had a really improved relationship with
the students on campus.
They really viewed us as more of a partner.
And I think a lot of that was due to the time we spent
working with student government and making sure
that it was seen as a joint effort between what they were
voicing from student needs and what we needed to do
technology-wise.
The students really felt like that we had heard them and
that we were actively working to give them a service that
met their needs better.
We also, obviously, can take advantage of Google's
increased pace for innovation.
This has been really great.
It's amazing to me how many new features and applications
they are able to roll out so quickly.
And the service continues to evolve to better meet the
needs of the students as their needs to continue to grow.
We avoided spending $1.5 million by
switching to Google.
Obviously, since our legacy architecture was being
de-supported by the vendor, we needed to move faculty and
staff, as well.
We chose to move faculty and staff to a different in-house
service, because our University leadership and our
General Council were a little nervous about moving faculty
and staff who deal with more University-sensitive data to
an outsource system.
They weren't as familiar with cloud computing.
They wanted to, essentially, try to put students first and
see where it went before they decided that it was OK for
faculty and staff to move to that service.
That 1.5 million cost that we avoided would have been spent
on additional hardware, licensing, and especially
storage if we had moved them to the in-house service that
we moved faculty and staff to.
The storage costs alone, we can't even compare to Google.
They're offering a 7 gigabyte quota.
We could have spent the entire budget for our department
trying to match that for students.
So that was a huge win for us.
In addition to that, it freed up a lot of staff time, so
that our staff could work on the in-house faculty/staff
service that we were moving to, as well as an identity
management project and some security-related projects here
on campus that we really needed strong resources for.
So some lessons learned.
The biggest lesson that I could share with all of you is
that customer buy-in is really crucial.
You need to know what it is that your students want and
why they want it.
And if you can get them to buy into what you're wanting to
give them, if you can show them how it's going to meet
their needs, they will love you.
And it will go a long way to making the project a success.
Marketing and communication makes a big difference.
If we had not spent the time and effort continually making
sure that students, as well as faculty and staff, were aware
of what was going on, the project would have fallen flat
on its face, and it really was a huge success.
We demonstrated those tools to the University leadership, to
faculty who were asking about it, to staff that were
wondering how they would work with students.
And that made a really big difference in making sure they
felt comfortable with this change and that they would
still be able to work with students effectively, and in
some cases even more effectively
than they had before.
Plan the migration carefully.
You need to make sure that everybody, not just students,
but also faculty and staff are prepared for the change, so
that everyone knows what's going on.
And the communication is just as important as the technology
changes that you're making.
And then, the biggest lesson was that we really wished we
had done this sooner.
It was so easy.
And it made the students so much happier, that we really
felt like this was a brain-dead simple
decision for us.
It would have been nice to have done it six months
earlier, even.
So looking forward, we're going to continue to market
and educate the students about Google Apps and the new
features that are coming online.
Google's made things like Google Gears available, that
provides offline access to a lot of the
services in Google Apps.
There's push notification for contacts and calendars.
They've enabled some APIs to allow you cross-domain
scheduling if your students are on Google and your faculty
and staff are on a different service.
We're looking into doing that.
In addition to that, we're anxiously awaiting all the new
apps and improvements that Google continues to release,
because the product just keeps getting better.
Working with the faculty to grow these Google Apps in the
classroom is actually probably one of the things that we're
working hardest at, because students are so excited about
the service that they really want their faculty
to start using it.
And one of the ways that we've been working with faculty is
on the development of an e-portfolio system.
Our team here at Notre Dame that works with our academic
technology partnered with the College of Engineering here to
create an e-portfolio that chemical engineering majors
can use throughout their academic career at Notre Dame
to develop a portfolio that they can take with them
through their career as well as after
they leave Notre Dame.
And they did that using Google Sites, which is kind of like a
web page publishing service.
It's a wiki-like service, as well as a documentation
storing service.
So it uses all those functions to really bring together a
suite of tools that the students can then bundle
together to provide a portfolio of their work, which
was really a big success.
And we're looking at where else we can use that in the
University.
We're also developing our ongoing marketing plans.
This September, we plan to email all the students with a
summary of the new features and changes that Google's
released over the last few months.
We're going to be running some ads in the student newspaper
featuring the top tips that we're
getting for using Google.
And we're also going to be asking students to start
sharing their tips with each other via our website.
We're going to have a new feature story on the OIT
website that highlights Google Apps again.
And we're working on implementing a lot of the news
feeds that Google is providing through their blogs, or their
application status dashboard, into our existing website as
well as our campus portal.
We're going to continue to develop that relationship that
we have with Student Government, to make sure that
they continue to bring to us the needs that the students
are voicing, as well as, you know, we can push information
to them through that venue.
We're going to also be growing the partnerships with some
other campus groups, such as the Student Activities
Organization, as well as the green and sustainability
groups that have developed here on campus.
There's a lot of growth in that area here at Notre Dame,
and Google Apps is actually a really great way to stop
having to print so much information and to make
sharing of information more electronic.
So that meets their needs in a lot of ways.
We're also going to be having a contest here with the
students, for them to design a Notre Dame Gmail theme.
And we'll actually have the student body vote on which
they would prefer, and then we'll be working with Google
to roll that theme out to students.
So now, I will go ahead and open it up for some Q&A. I'd
be happy to help answer any questions you guys might have.
MALE SPEAKER: Thanks, Katie.
That was really very insightful.
Very interesting presentation.
What we're going to do now is we're going to move over to
the Google Moderator Application.
That's where a lot of our attendees
have put their questions.
And I'm going to read out the questions and, hopefully
Katie, you can help us address those questions.
So the first question is, why only students and alumni, and
not staff and administration as well?
KATIE ROSE: Well, like I said, our General Council and
University leadership are not as comfortable with cloud
computing and they're unsure about how University sensitive
data would be handled.
And it's not that they don't trust Google, because our
contract would actually cover all of those things.
It's more that they, they were unfamiliar with it.
And so, they're starting to look into rolling things out
to staff and administration also.
But at this point, they don't plan on doing that for the
entire group.
What we are doing right now, though, is we are allowing
faculty to request access to Google Apps as they want it,
and then we will create an account for them.
And we kind of provide them some guidelines, to make sure
that they understand, you know, that this is hosted
somewhere else and, you know, they need to really pay
attention to how they are displaying data and whether
it's made public or if they're sharing it to specific people
or not, just so that they're aware.
It's a new system.
They are not as familiar, often times, with the Google
services as students are.
So we kind of still have to spend a little time educating
them about it.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you, Katie.
And, just to mention, we have a lot of universities,
including some very large universities like Boise State,
Saint Louis University, Columbia State University, a
lot of universities that are moving everyone including
faculty and staff over into Google Apps.
Just wanted to mention that.
CINDY: All right, so on to the next question.
How much were you able to integrate Google Apps with
other services, like automatically populating
students' calendars with their course schedule or being able
to auto-complete email addresses with information
from your LDAP.
KATIE ROSE: Right now, we do not automatically populate
student calendars with their course schedules.
But we are actually looking into doing that.
We've had, actually, several student projects from within
the business office and engineering, that actually
started to work on a way to do that.
One of the key pieces of that project, of course, would be
having the students' schedule in a format
that could be published.
And right now, our administrative system that
they use for student information doesn't provide
that in an easily exportable format.
So that's one of the things we're looking into.
The auto-completion of email addresses.
Google actually released some improvements to their LDAP
connectivity recently, and so we are looking
into that as well.
We don't currently have it available.
But that is by our choice.
We're also looking at integrating Google Apps into
some other services.
We spent the first year, essentially, getting
comfortable with just the basic Google Apps.
And now, we're looking into how else we can use it and
make it a more integrated experience with other systems
here at Notre Dame.
So, you know, one of the things we want to do is
integrate it with our student information system to, you
know, allow students to register, allow them to get
their class schedule and some other things like that, so
that we can give them more of that holistic experience
instead of having to look in different locations for
different things.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you, Katie.
And here's another question.
And I think you addressed this during the presentation as
well, but here it is again.
So, the question is, satisfaction
increased by 36%, you say.
What, specifically, did students
love about the switch?
And what were the problems that Google Apps solved?
So if you can briefly address that again.
KATIE ROSE: Sure.
The number one thing that they really disliked about the
legacy system was the webmail utility itself.
And they wanted specifically Gmail in its place.
So Google Apps obviously solved that number one issue.
Gmail is actually my preferred email client, as well.
The web interface for it, I think, is fantastic.
And our students really, really love that.
In addition to that, they really liked having a much
larger email quota.
Going from 100 megabytes to seven gigs is huge.
They liked having an integrated calendar.
They liked having the ability to use Google docs and other
things and have those all integrate into one service
that they could access.
And that really, I think, has been kind of the big overall
win, is that they really, they didn't get
just a new email system.
They got a whole suite of tools that work together.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you.
Cindy, do you want to go with the next question?
CINDY: Sure.
The next question is, do you have any plans to introduce
any more of Google's features, either those available via
Google Apps or cloud computing?
Now, I think this might be a question addressed at Google,
so let me just take a stab at answering that.
So, Google Apps is dedicated to offering a lot more
services as we get Google Apps ready.
For example, recently we implemented video, and we're
dedicated to improving the sites we're offering.
And so, we're actually going to include a lot more in the
future, as well.
Do you want to add anything, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]?
MALE SPEAKER: No, that-- if you look at our history, you
will see that, you know, we started off with just Gmail
and Google Talk and, you know, over the course of the last
two years, we have introduced so many more features.
So you can definitely expect a lot more applications and
features and services coming in Google Apps down the road.
With that, let me go over to the next question, which is
about, I think this is addressed to you, Katie.
How did you address concerns about storing potentially
sensitive/private data on servers you didn't control?
KATIE ROSE: Most of that, actually all of that, I would
say, was really handled through our contract process.
Like I said, when we worked with Google, the things that
we were most concerned about was making sure that we would
stay compliant with rules like FERPA, and when we worked with
them on making sure the contract addressed those
things, it really handled addressing the sensitive
private data issues that the University was concerned with.
And it really was very simple.
Google was really easy to work with.
And it was not difficult.
The other side of that, of course, is that you have to
educate your users about where it's appropriate to have
sensitive information and how to handle it correctly.
And we have policies here at Notre Dame that really specify
how it's appropriate to deal with sensitive, private data
that the University owns, and that really covers, kind of,
the whole gamut of things, from the papers on your desk
to electronic information.
So making sure that your customers are educated about
the appropriate use of that data and how to protect it, as
well as dealing with the contract issues, really
handles the whole picture there.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you, Katie.
And I just wanted to add that, you know, just like you
mentioned, our terms of service definitely, you know,
it talks a lot about the confidentiality and privacy of
customer data.
You know, just so that you guys know, our data centers
are SAS 70 certified.
And, you know, we specifically call out the FERPA, you know,
laws as well, in our terms of service now.
So, you know, this is a huge issue, you know, as far as
Google is concerned as well.
And we are very cognizant of our
responsibilities in this area.
With that, let me hand the next question over to Cindy.
CINDY: The next one's a good one.
So, the question is, did you consider Microsoft offerings
in this space?
If so, why did you choose not to go with them?
KATIE ROSE: We did look at Microsoft Exchange Labs as one
of the other options we had.
We didn't choose Microsoft for a couple of reasons.
One of them was that it really didn't play nice across all of
the platforms, especially mobility-wise.
At the time that we were looking at this, the best
support that really gave you the full features for the
mobile devices only worked for Windows Mobile.
And we knew that we had a growing number of iPhones
coming on campus as well as Blackberries.
And we needed something that was going to work
across all of those.
In addition, it was really focused on Internet Explorer,
so that really was a downside for our Mac and Linux
community that we also were seeing growing numbers in.
So, at the time we made that decision, Microsoft really was
not going to be as fully featured a tool as we needed
it to be for the entire student body.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you.
And the next question is interesting as well.
And I think it's addressed to you.
So, do you ever have a legal/security need to access
student email accounts?
If so, are you able to do this?
KATIE ROSE: In the ten years I've worked at Notre Dame, I
know of only one time when we've been asked to access a
student email account for a legal or security need.
Generally speaking, the only time we have had a need to
look into a student account is really if it was being used to
spam some other account somewhere, at which time, we
just spin the account password.
We don't actually go in and look at the
student email account.
While our policy here at Notre Dame allows the University to
reserve the right to do that, it's very rarely if ever used
in my knowledge.
And while we can gain access to the student account on
Google if we need to, since we've moved to Google, we have
not had the need to.
And I'd be surprised.
It would really take an awful lot for the University to
direct us to do that for student emails.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you, Katie.
And I'll also add a little bit to that.
You know, if there is a legal need to access student email
accounts, you can always come to Google's customer support
with the subpoena or with that legal request, and Google will
be happy to help you with that.
And there are multiple other options as well.
Since the University, you as a university own the data, you
have access to the students email
accounts in multiple ways.
Everything from resetting email accounts to using some
of the new technology like OAuth to essentially
authenticate the administrator as a student and entering new
email accounts, as well as setting up mail gateways,
through which you can have, you know, emails passing
through that system where you can monitor a student's email
if you wanted to.
So all those options are available.
And Google Apps is very flexible and able to integrate
with other systems, to allow such a, you know, such kind
of, a legal security mechanism to be able to
monitor student email.
CINDY: Great.
So, the next question is, what did Notre Dame do
to account for the--
KATIE ROSE: Their mail continued to work through the
whole thing.
[? That ?] are out there and most of the other mail
interfaces that faculty or staff would use on campus were
totally unaffected.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
--were working on identity management, some of the
academic projects that we have under way, as well as
implementing the other service for faculty and staff.
MALE SPEAKER: Sounds good.
CINDY: Great.
The next question on mine is, have you talked about or plan
to implement any of the Google services into the
administrative offices on campus?
For example, Admissions Office in use for making appointments
of prospective students?

KATIE ROSE: Right now, although the faculty and staff
and the students are on different calendaring systems,
meeting invitations can be sent between the two.
Because Google complies with iCal's calendaring standards.
So, the admissions office can actually send an appointment
meeting to a student, and they can accept
or decline in Google.
And the response goes back to the administrative staff here.
As well as, vice versa.
Students can invite a faculty or staff member to a meeting,
and that person can accept and decline.
And the student will see the response. as well.
So in that respect, they are already working together.
We are continuing to talk with university leadership about
providing Google accounts to faculty and staff, on a larger
scale, especially for departmental usage.
And we are starting to do that.
Slowly.
you know, for instance, the law school here has a Google
account, and they use that to publish calendars about events
for all of the different areas of the law school.
And then students can subscribe to those events,
those event calendars.
So that's definitely one area that we're looking to grow,
but there is already some usage that just works out of
the box, whether they're on Google or not.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you.
And the other question, I think
this was already addressed.
It had to do annual savings for the institution.
And they mention including hardware, software,
personnel, et cetera.
So I think you already mentioned the
$1.5 million number.

KATIE ROSE: It's amazing to me, actually, how simple this
was to implement and how little time our email
administrators and our directory middleware people
really have to spend on managing this service.
Google has done a fantastic job.

We just make sure that the accounts get provisioned
appropriately.
And that's really all we have to take care of in that sense.
So, it really cut back a lot of time that we were spending,
investigating issues for students about what was going
on with our legacy mail service.
In terms of hardware and software costs, obviously we
don't buy hardware for our mail service every year.
But the initial $1.5 million to implement the new system we
implemented for faculty and staff made a huge difference.
And I don't know that we've ever pulled together the
annual savings for software costs, because obviously you
renew licenses every year.
But Google is currently offering this service at no
cost. So no matter what you do here, you're going to be
saving some money.

FEMALE SPEAKER: All right, so the next question on here is,
do you still offer alternative email access, or do you offer
this service as an option, providing an alternative for
those who wish not to use Google Apps?
KATIE ROSE: We currently only offer email service to
students through Google.
They have the option to forward their mail, using
Google's utility, to another email
address if they so choose.

The University's stance is that your Notre Dame email
address is one of the official communication mechanisms. So
they are required to check their Notre Dame mail in some
way, shape or form.
But they aren't allowed to really opt out of the service
in the first place.
And we've not, we've had only one student who did not want
to use Google, and we ended up talking to him a little
further and got him to use it.
So everybody else was really happy to switch over.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Great.

MALE SPEAKER: And, so, the next question is, is the
POP/IMAP access active, as in any of the Google Apps-based
email system?
KATIE ROSE: Yes.
We do have POP and IMAP access turned on.
That's something that can be set
specifically for your domain.
So you can choose to only offer service through the
Gmail web interface.
Or you can turn on POP and IMAP and allow them to use
other clients.
We chose to do that because that is something we've always
made available to our students, and we didn't want
to take away any functionality.
And we see, we still see a fair number of students using
POP and IMAP clients, especially from their phones
we see that.
But most of the students really seem to prefer webmail
interfaces.
I think because that's what they've been
used to growing up.

CINDY: So, I just want to take a step back.
We have a couple of questions regarding that one student who
did not want to use Google.
What were their concerns?
And why didn't they want to use Google?
We had a couple of questions in the Q&A.
KATIE ROSE: They were concerned about privacy and
having their email stored at a commercial, at a commercial
service not here on campus.
And, you know, when we talked with them, we explained that,
you know, the University had signed a contract with Google,
and that Google handles this data according to the rules of
that contract.
And, you know, we kind of walked them through that.
And that really helped convince them that their
information was safe.
And that they weren't being treated as a
second class citizen.
CINDY: Gotcha.
Thanks for the clarification.
MALE SPEAKER: And the next question is, we provide email
forwarding for life, so that they're ensured that the
person's email address continues to keep them
connected to us and their colleagues for years.
Did your school offer something similar and
successfully transition the service to Google?
KATIE ROSE: Yes.
Actually, our alumni service offers email for life.
And previously, they had offered just a forwarding
service, where you just have an email address that
forwarded somewhere else.
They had actually received a lot of requests from the
alumni here, for an actual mailbox instead of just a
forwarding address.
And so, when we signed the contract with Google, we
actually started to transition the alumni service over to
Google as well.
And they actually are in a separate domain from the
students, because it was important for our university
leadership.
They felt like it was important to visually
distinguish between active students and alumni.
And so, they have an alumni.nd.edu domain that they
can continue to use for as long as they want to, once
they graduate.
And we have instructions posted for them on how to
transition between the two accounts.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you.
And I think we have time for just one more question.
KATIE ROSE: All right.
The last question is, how did this implementation change the
amount of effort required to administer
students' user accounts.
CINDY: It actually made it much easier.
There was a lot less for us to managed here at Notre Dame.
We get the information from our state information system
on who is an active student.
We make sure that their account gets created in Google
and we do that on a daily basis.
And then when they graduate and we get the information
that they are no longer a student here, we make sure
that we go back through and
de-provision the count correctly.
Instead of having to not only provision the account, but
provision in their mailbox, and back up their mail and
make sure that all of that happens.
We don't have to worry about that anymore.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you.
And with that, we'll come to the end of this Q&A. And
again, Katie, I would like to thank you for your time and
your talking to us about your implementation, your
presentation and especially answering all these questions.
I'm sure our attendees really had a good time and enjoyed
this presentation.
KATIE ROSE: I'm happy I could help.
And feel free to email me if we have any questions that
didn't get answered.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you.
And I also wanted to remind all the attendees that we are
recording this webinar .

So there will be a video available.
very soon on our website.
and wanted to remind you again about our web site.
www.google.com/a/edu.
And with that, we're coming to the end of the audio portion
of this webinar.
Cindy and I will remain online for a few more minutes to
answer the last few remaining questions in the Q&A section
within the WebEx.
And, you know, once we are done, maybe we should expect
to receive an email from us with the presentation and
hopefully a link to the video as well for
this recorded webinar.
and with that, I'd like to thank everyone who joined us
today for this webinar.
Everyone, have a great day.