Technology director Bill Herman has migrated the district's email over to Google. Our new email addresses are firstname.lastname@mgschools.net. You can still continue to use the old addresses so the change should be transparent from the outside. The change is motivated by a desire to provide a more reliable system with less maintenance and support.
Bill estimates an equivalent system hosted in house would cost $95,000 to startup and $60,000 in annual operating costs. The costs of the Google system? Zero.
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4 comments:
the security of the google system: zero?
I'm curious why you say that?
GMail, like any mail, including the district's current server, is imperfect. But the consensus seems to be that gmail is likely to be at least as secure as anything the district can provide.
Was just asking. Didn't know. Sensitive info about students, etc. Just wondering how secure, more, less, or the same.
Just the first question I would ask. I know free email is full of ads. Gmail less so, but the Google compiler is taking info of all kinds out of those emails. I'm not sure if that is server side and if the mail goes to a google acct. if it is compromised as well.
So it was just a question, not a challenge.
Answer: Nobody knows, nobody cares.
(I think that's what it amounts to anyway, right?)
Gmail for schools isn't ad supported. It works like their paid Gmail for business services, but for schools it is offered free. So Google isn't scanning emails for keywords.
Obviously if they wanted to Google could be reading everyone's email, but you have the same problem with any 3rd party provided email server, even if hosted in house. If the provider was doing something nefarious you would have little way of knowing. At a certain level the only thing you can do is trust that the deterence provided by the legal system is sufficient.
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