iNews: IT Planning

Exploration of partnership opportunities for campus collaborative tools

Ian Crew, IST–DS

Earlier this year, a diverse committee of campus leaders met with representatives from Google and Microsoft to explore the Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Live@EDU service offerings, and to determine if these vendors' offerings in the areas of mail, calendaring, and web-based file sharing are a reasonable alternative to UC Berkeley running these services locally (via the current CalMail, WebFiles, and CalAgenda services).

In addition to examining the benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing campus messaging services, such as email and calendaring, to one of these vendors, the committee also explored their associated collaborative tools offerings, such as collaborative writing; social bookmarking; photo, audio, and video sharing; and mapping, which may also be of considerable campus interest.

A series of four meetings, including one each with Google and Microsoft, allowed committee members to probe the details of these service offerings and led to a wide-ranging discussion of the relation of the campus's needs to these services. At the conclusion of these discussions, the majority of the committee felt that the following issues were of particular concern.

  1. The current vendor offerings for email, calendaring, and file sharing are less technically capable in certain important areas than the offerings currently in place on campus and are therefore not sufficiently compelling to induce us to consider switching from offering our own services at this point.
  1. Improvements to existing services may be feasible at acceptable costs, for example,
  1. Both vendors' offerings raised concerns over privacy, concerns which a number of committee members described as "showstoppers" at the current time. Several other members felt that these privacy issues might be manageable, if addressed.
  1. The vendors' collaborative tools offerings beyond the email, calendaring, and file-sharing applications are not yet sufficiently compelling to make it worth overlooking the limitations in the other services.
  1. This is an extremely rapidly developing area in the IT industry with tremendous potential to deliver compelling collaborative tools. We should continue to monitor it closely, with an eye to discovering when the services offered become more compelling and if our major concerns are resolved.
  1. In any scenario, it is important to develop a better and deeper understanding of the user needs of the campus community before considering implementing any of these services, whether for email, calendaring, file sharing, or other collaborative tools.

The complete report can be found at http://oneist.berkeley.edu/data-services/2007/06/report_on_campus_collaborative.html.

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