Our journey to the cloud may be approaching quicker than we think. Recently, TAMU has launched two pilot projects to examine the feasibility of moving all university email  to a cloud-based service. The two leading candidates are Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Office 365. None of this should be a surprise to anyone as the consumerization of IT in higher education continues to pick up steam. Our student senate recently passed a GoGoogle initiative. There is also a (less vocal) demand for cloud services among our faculty and staff. As we begin to get a handle on how to implement cloud-based services on our campus, believe that email is just the beginning. Other services will undoubtedly follow. But the journey looks to begin with email, and like many things, the devil is in the details. As IT professionals, we want to make the best choice to fill our needs while maintaining flexibility and security.

Other institutions around the country have been wrestling with the move to the cloud. For example, Berkeley recently completed a comparison of Google and Microsoft email and calendaring features. Even our own neighbors such as t.u. have gone to Google Apps. Ian Hardenburgh over at Tech Republic has an excellent comparison spreadsheet for reference. He gives O365 the edge for large organizations. Some of our sister (system) institutions are exploring the possibility of skipping the cloud and moving their email to managed Exchange with one of the commercial data centers like RackSpace. This has the attraction of being able to more tightly control not only the physical location of data (important for our lawyer types) but also the integration of the system with more services. The downside to this approach is the cost when compared to other cloud-based services.

TAMU currently is running pilots for both Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Office 365, and it will be interesting to see how these pilots go. One this is for sure, the times, they are a’changein.