For the past several years, a number of IT units have been coordinating their Dell purchases in order to take advantage of greater discounts. By approaching Dell with a large commitment of purchases over an agreed time period, all units can take advantage of the same discounts regardless of order size. This buying opportunity is colloquially referred to as the Dell "Big Buy." This year, special discounts will be applied to anything purchased from Dell between April 15^th and May 15^th (2008) through the Dell web portal in eProcurement.

You can get access to the Dell web portal by making a FAST request for the eProcurement module in the PeopleSoft Financials through your Information Coordinator. To access the big buy quotes, find the section titled "SU Promotional Pricing April 15 - May 15" located on the first page of the Dell web portal. There you will find several standard configurations of systems, laptops, desktops, printers, and monitors that can be customized to meet your needs. If you can't find what you need, e-mail Stanley Ziemba with special requests including servers, arrays, and literally anything on Dell website. The quote with special pricing will be added to the web portal for anyone to purchase one or more.

Another "Big Buy" will be organized later in the summer for units who prefer to purchase at the beginning of the fiscal year.

For questions or requests contact Stanley Ziemba at sjziemba@maxwell.syr.edu or x9011.

Submitted by Stanley Ziemba

As most of you know, this summer we planned to move students to our Active Directory e-mail system (Exchange), because our current student e-mail systems (MyMail and Orange-mail) proved less than ideal both for our students to use and for us to manage.

While planning this move, we were carefully monitoring the development of two commercially outsourced alternatives offered by Google and Microsoft that were just hitting the market place at that time. There has been a lot of media buzz over the last year or so about both these products, and for good reason. The student e-mail service of both Google and Microsoft have matured and improved substantially. The fact that both services are offered for free clearly adds to their attractiveness.

For us here at SU, the Microsoft offering is especially attractive, since they are basically offering the same software we would have provided to students this summer with our in-house system. Moreover, the Microsoft e-mail services will provide students with more storage space and some additional features for collaboration. We have also addressed some of our key concerns around privacy/data mining, mobile device support, account administration, and @syr.edu address management. This solution would allow us to maintain accounts for alumni indefinitely, although unlike active students, their service would include advertising.

Many Universities have either moved to or are in the process of moving to either Google or Microsoft student e-mail. This gives us a reasonably high level of confidence that this solution would also work for Syracuse and that Microsoft has made a long-term commitment to this service offering. Furthermore, should we need to bring student e-mail back "in-house" at some point in the future, the compatibility of Microsoft's student e-mail system with our "in-house" Exchange system would make this a fairly easy and straightforward task.

And yes, Microsoft would provide this e-mail service to all enrolled students at SU for free. The business strategy behind this is simple. Microsoft is investing in a "long-term" relationship with our students by offering them free e-mail while they are enrolled, in an effort to get them interested in the Microsoft suite of products for what could be a lifetime. Furthermore, once students are no longer enrolled, Microsoft hopes they will continue to utilize their e-mail accounts. At that point, they will have to "pay" for the accounts or accept advertisements.

While Microsoft is providing this service for free, it is not totally free to the University. We still have to "filter" e-mail for SPAM here on campus, provide the interface to the service, and help students with issues. Nevertheless, we estimate that once we initially put this service in place, we could realize a total savings of $100K to $150K a year.

The bottom line is that we are now planning to outsource our student electronic mail service to Microsoft's Live@EDU service this summer. This offering provides all of the features that ITS had planned to include as well as some additional services not in our plans that add value--all at a lower cost. This savings will help to offset the existing deficits in ITS's operating budget.

The move to outsourcing student e-mail does raise some interesting issues that are worth taking a few more moments of reflection. Does this mean that we will eventually be "outsourcing" IT? Is this the beginning of a trend where we outsource all our key services? Unlikely. Rather, it opens up another chapter that makes our vision of "connections" all the more important.

A discussion of this issue recently took place on the EDUCAUSE CIO listserv, and I think my colleagues, Brad Wheeler and Richard Katz, summarized very nicely what the future may hold for us. To paraphrase, we are basically at the dawn of an era of "cloud" computing where we will not only continue building services, but also "buying" and "borrowing" technology services. Moreover, many of the services we build will be in cooperative ventures with colleagues across higher education. What this means is that our future success will depend on our technical prowess as well as our ability to manage our relations and connections. Our future challenge will be to seamlessly integrate the various components of an increasingly complex technology cloud. The future campus will, if anything, be even more dependent on all of us to make this vast cloud of complex technology work.

IT Professional Development