Originally Posted by deadpool

From my understanding, ELM is the result of UTS trying to emulate Blackboard after the company pulled out of McMaster, and badly so.

Wrong. ELM is owned and operated by Blackboard, and has been licensed to McMaster for use.

From ELM itself:

Blackboard, the vendor of the ELM system, is working to correct these problems.

Yes, I made a typo on UTS. My bad.

Also Taunton, your conspiracy theories about the control of information are getting asinine. Reading your comments one would be inclined to believe that in 2012, the doomsday conspiracy will come when Google eradicates the sun using all the information they store.

My thoughts are not conspiracy theories, rather they are legitimate concerns. If I give my information to a third party, do I not lose ultimate control over that information? I would much prefer that any potential problems rest between myself and McMaster. Introducing a third party to do something that quite frankly McMaster should be able to do on its own is merely complicating things unnecessarily.

Should something like this ever actually happen, there would be a long legal process to ensure that our information is protected.

To be honest, I trust Google with security a lot more than I trust McMaster. Google might be a bigger target, but they are also a lot more secure.

And I would assume that long legal process was already enacted when other schools first started to make the switch.

Originally Posted by madquarker

But our email is based on mac IDs, not student numbers. Also, we wouldn't have to use the Google domain name; they would let us keep using "@mcmaster.ca"

Also... how many times do you know of that Google's email servers have been hacked?

I'm just tired of the 1963 user interface lol. And the poor storage capacity. And the poor features. And lack of features.

you do know that you can route your Mcmaster email account to something like hotmail?

Originally Posted by Taunton

Wrong. ELM is owned and operated by Blackboard, and has been licensed to McMaster for use.

Rohan is sort of right, I was in a meeting with UTS for online voting when I asked them about ELM. ELM was contracted out to a third party company(presumably blackboard); they pulled out when the project was 60-70% done, UTS programmers had to step in and complete it. Blackboard possibly is back on board right now, but when I asked them in October UTS said they are "trying" to get BlackBoard back on board.


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Introducing a third party to do something that quite frankly McMaster should be able to do on its own is merely complicating things unnecessarily.

They key world is "should". But they cannot, our system was built for less then 15,000 students according to the head of Registrars office. It is completely useless for our needs and cannot sustain itself or the students, more often then not registrar has to do stuff manually because the system messes up automated data feeds.

There is an approx $15-25 million overhaul needed to the ENTIRE system, that includes MUSS and MUGSI in it. We cannot target one thing and improve it, because the costs are excessive, in other words if we spend $1 million on SOLAR we will have to spend half or even more then that amount integrating it with the other areas. They are all interconnected. Also they wouldn't support spending $1-2 million on improving one little thing when the whole structure might get improved over $20+ cost. Making the temporary upgrades null and void

Hence it needs to be done once and for all, unfortunately outside donors are highly unlikely to spend on our technology infrastructure. We might need government funding for this or for Mac Admin to coax up money from somewhere in the budget. As we stand now we are facing a $40 million expected deficiet.

Hence I think google suites is a good idea, Google I'm assuming has strong enough legal privacy laws that universities like Notredam, USC, Alberta etc have adopted Google Suite.

I'll be trying to get a meeting with someone else next week about this issue and how hard/easy it will be to integrate it. The benefits for it are huge(Google Docs for eg are plain awesome!)

Just for the record, the ELM system is managed by the Centre for Leadership in Learning (http://cll.mcmaster.ca/), not UTS. It's a different department.

MUSS is provided to undergraduates for those that wish to use it. It's completely optional. You're welcome to use Gmail, or any other mail service. You can even point your McMaster alias ([email protected]) to that external account, and completely bypass MUSS.

Also, you might be interested in this related story posted on zdnet - Patriot Act preventing Google Apps adoption in schools - http://education.zdnet.com/?p=1597

-Mike

If I'm not mistaken, the access to business records was one of the provisions of the Patriot Act set to expire this year. And there is the chance that Obama will let them expire (although he has said he intends to renew them at this point).

There's still a shot that he'll come to his senses though.

I hate new things. So this year when I started using Gmail for Welcome Week planning I hated it! But after a few days I fell in love. It was easy, allowed for collaberation(which would be fantastic for group work! cough... commerce, psych, any anyone else.... cough)

Also why can we not trust a company which the US government trusts? Seriously if you are worried about info getting leaked, I don't think people are going to care when I email a friend my Poli Sci paper for editing compared to other info.

Also these would free up tons of servers which could go to MUGSI which I think we can all agree with is a huge problem too! Two problems being solved by a free solution? Fantastic!

Finally I think one of the big issues is not only the capabilities of doing this but the realestate. Mac needs to purchase more servers to be able to produce a quality equal to Googles. Where would they put all of this? Big issue.

I think it is clear, when a company can do something cheaper, and more effective, while still allowing mac full control over the system(which I forgot to mention but they do) its pretty much a no brainer that this is an amazing idea!

Several universities in the states (much larger than McMaster, some with 40000+ students) have successfully migrated to Google apps. Each student gets:

- 7GB email space (for life, doesn't expire after you graduate)
- Google Calendar (with room scheduling, etc.)
- No advertisements
- 99.9% uptime

Plus more. Think about it, collaborative word processing, spreadsheets, etc. for group collaboration.

Originally Posted by Taunton

Wrong. ELM is owned and operated by Blackboard, and has been licensed to McMaster for use.

From ELM itself:

Yes, I made a typo on UTS. My bad.



My thoughts are not conspiracy theories, rather they are legitimate concerns. If I give my information to a third party, do I not lose ultimate control over that information? I would much prefer that any potential problems rest between myself and McMaster. Introducing a third party to do something that quite frankly McMaster should be able to do on its own is merely complicating things unnecessarily.

Should something like this ever actually happen, there would be a long legal process to ensure that our information is protected.

im pretty sure this thread is about the mac email system NOT elm

Originally Posted by aaront

Several universities in the states (much larger than McMaster, some with 40000+ students) have successfully migrated to Google apps. Each student gets:

- 7GB email space (for life, doesn't expire after you graduate)
- Google Calendar (with room scheduling, etc.)
- No advertisements
- 99.9% uptime

Plus more. Think about it, collaborative word processing, spreadsheets, etc. for group collaboration.

We'd be able to book rooms through Google Calendar?!? Ok, that's just awesome.

I'm not sure that collaborative word processing is such a huge selling point though, since they already offer it to anyone with gmail. I'll probably still use Docs only from my personal gmail, as would most people I assume.

I've heard from many university staff that if you set up your muss account to forward to another account, that they have a large number of problems when they send out mass emails or other important information. I have been told by numerous staff to make sure I dont set up my email like that or nothing gets through, and they wont see the email as being unable to send, so you just miss out.

The school email accounts are for official purposes. Sending basic information and being a secure place to contact you, and an identifiable way for you to communicate with the university. To be accessible to everyone it has to be a simple interface.

If you want to be able to do all sorts of useless operations, use another mail service, there are plenty out there with tons of features you will probably never need.

If the school switches over, there will be a lot of people who will no longer be able to access their email, just so a few can be happy looking at a prettier interface. Doesnt seem worth it for now.

I don't get how they would not be able to access their email. If it is because connection is too slow, gmail has an option to load with basic html for slow connections. If it is because of the things you mentioned about problems with emails being forwarded to another account, that would not be an issue here. Gmail would be hosting the primary accounts, the info wouldn't be forwarded, it would be sent there directly from another gmail hosted account. The fact that setting the forwarding up doesn't work properly is another strike against MUSS's outdated system.

Gmail is also a much simpler interface in terms of layout, it is much more understandable and user friendly. The MUSS accounts make basic things like deleting emails a multi-step process, whereas even people without prior gmail experience can start using it right away without difficulty.

Originally Posted by Rossclot

I've heard from many university staff that if you set up your muss account to forward to another account, that they have a large number of problems when they send out mass emails or other important information. I have been told by numerous staff to make sure I dont set up my email like that or nothing gets through, and they wont see the email as being unable to send, so you just miss out.

The school email accounts are for official purposes. Sending basic information and being a secure place to contact you, and an identifiable way for you to communicate with the university. To be accessible to everyone it has to be a simple interface.

If you want to be able to do all sorts of useless operations, use another mail service, there are plenty out there with tons of features you will probably never need.

If the school switches over, there will be a lot of people who will no longer be able to access their email, just so a few can be happy looking at a prettier interface. Doesnt seem worth it for now.

Where to start...

1) Forwarding emails is an issue with the archaic MUSS system we're stuck with now, and the main reason people forward emails is to avoid dealing with MUSS, switching to google doesn't mean forwarding all the MUSS emails to google, it means the core email server will be gmail, MUSS wont exist. This avoids both problems with the horrid interface and crappy forwarding system in MUSS and, unlike MUSS, gmail has reliable forwarding to other email accounts unlike MUSS.

2) As Andrew already said, Gmail is a simpler interface than MUSS and on top of that Gmail is far more usable from mobile devices like smartphones making using the email account far more accessible.

3) Useless operations such as searching through main efficiently, auto-saving drafts so mails don't get deleted if you accidentally navigate away from the page, a simple interface, highly accessible email on smartphones, decent storage space so you can actually keep your messages without the fear of having important messages rejected because you ran out of inbox space? There's no way I could see any students ever using those or finding them useful, they're all just useless operations that only a small group of the nerdiest of the nerdy computer nerds would ever find useful.

4) If the school switches over, everyone will have better email service, the school will save thousands of dollars and we'll free up server space for use with ELM and MUGSI/Solar. The only real negative is that the servers are in the states which is subject to the patriot act, apart from that it's win-win for google, the students, and the school.