Delimiter » live@edu

Griffith Uni dumps Lotus for Gmail

Renai LeMay — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 05:26:20 +0000

news Queensland’s Griffith University has become the latest educational institution to shift its staff email accounts into Google’s cloud, announcing yesterday that it would ditch IBM’s troubled Lotus Notes/Domino suite as it did so.

The university had previously shifted its 120,000 staff and alumni onto Google’s Apps platform in early 2010. However, up until now, the institution’s staff had still been using Lotus Notes/Domino, hosted on-premise in its own datacentre. According to a statement issued by the university last week, however, all that is about to change. Pilot groups of staff will move to Google Apps this month (October), the statement said, and most staff will move after the University’s examination period in November. All staff will be migrated by March 2012.

Google Apps will provide opportunities for staff and students to enjoy deeper, richer collaborations and tap into “the world’s latest communication innovations, according to Griffith’s pro vice chancellor (Information Services), Linda O’Brien.

“We were drawn to the fact Google shares similar characteristics to Griffith, with both organisations being innovative, youthful, fast moving, and committed to advancing knowledge — Griffith through its research and teaching, Google through making the world’s information and knowledge accessible,” O’Brien said. “Griffith is a leading research university that cares about its students and staff, so it makes sense to create an environment that places our staff and students in the same space, facilitating collaboration and learning.

“Our academics need the ability to collaborate globally, to communicate, share, and build strong research relationships if we are to advance knowledge and solve the world’s biggest problems. Google makes this borderless collaboration easy,” she said.

Griffith will give its staff access to the complete Google Apps suite, with 25GB of email storage space being unlocked and tools like Google’s Docs office suite, calendar and Talk collaboration suite being made available.

“We are very happy to see yet another leading University in Australia adopt Google Apps,” said Stuart McLean, Google’s Head of Enterprise, Australia and New Zealand. “Education cannot be restricted to the walls of a classroom, it is when ideas can be quickly expressed, shared and developed that learning takes a whole new meaning.” Google Partner Dialog IT will aid with the migration.

A number of major Australian educational institutions have migrated both their staff and students to Google Apps over the past several years. However, Microsoft has won more business than Google in the sector over that period, with its Live@EDU and Exchange platforms proving more attractive than Google Apps for most organisations.

Image credit: Robert Scoble, Creative Commons

Melbourne Uni students ‘strongly’ prefer Gmail

Renai LeMay — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 05:23:57 +0000

The University of Melbourne has picked Gmail for its new student email platform, after polls of students indicated a “strong” preference for the Google offering over the alternative Live@EDU platform, despite the popularity of the Microsoft offering amongst university IT administrators around the nation.

“You asked for it — you got it!” Results from a series of focus groups with student representatives indicated a strong preference for Google to replace the existing student email system,” the university stated on a new web site set up recently to inform students of the change, in response to a question on why it had picked Google Apps for the rollout.

Melbourne University Provost John Dewar publicised the move in an email to the institution’s 44,000-strong student body this week, stating the university had been working on a replacement for its legacy email system for some time.

The news comes as the two competing platforms have been engaged in a running dogfight for the hearts and minds of Australia’s educational institutions over the past several years in Australia. But after a series of skirmishes — the latest one which resulted in the University of Technology Sydney picking Live@EDU over the past several weeks, it has appeared that the Microsoft camp was winning.

Microsoft now counts several handfuls of organisations on its win list for Live@EDU — including UTS, Edith Cowan University, WA Central TAFE, Curtin University, the Australian Catholic University, the University of Western Sydney, Flinders University, TAFE SA, the University of NSW and the University of Queensland.

In comparison, Gmail has won fewer victories against the Microsoft juggernaut — counting the University of Adelaide, Macquarie University and Monash University in its camp. Google does, however, hold the largest education email account in Australia — NSW’s Department of Education and Training — with 1.5 million students.

Dewar told students Melbourne University’s email migration project was close to completion, with students to receive invitations to the new Google platform from December 2010 on a staggered basis, with the whole migration expected to take eight weeks.

“The ultimate aim is to provide a user-friendly and cost-effective email system, which will offer enhanced functionality for all students,” he said. Once the email accounts of all students have been transitioned across to the new platform, the university’s legacy systems will be “decommissioned”.

Image credit: Google

Microsoft wins UTS as Gmail falters

Renai LeMay — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:20:47 +0000

The University of Technology Sydney has picked Microsoft’s Live@EDU as its new hosted student email platform, in a move which further locks Google’s Gmail offering out of Australia’s education sector.

The two competing platforms have been engaged in a running dogfight for the hearts and minds of Australia’s educational institutions over the past several years in Australia. But after a series of skirmishes, it appears that the Microsoft camp is winning.

In an interview this morning, UTS deputy director of IT Chris Cahill said the university had established a committee to decide between Live@EDU and Gmail. The committee had been aware that Live@EDU had gradually been winning ground over Gmail, he said.

This fact gave him “comfort” about UTS’ own move, he said, although he noted that the trend wasn’t a factor in the decision, with UTS deciding between the pair on their individual merits.

In the end, the choice between the two options came down to the fact that UTS was already using substantial portions of the Microsoft software stack, said Cahill, and also the support options provided by the software giant were seen as being above those offered by Google — including on-site promotion.

“To be honest, both presented a really good value proposition, there’s very little between them in my mind,” Cahill said. The committee did consider the user interface of the two offerings, but Cahill said he didn’t think there was much difference in the end.

UTS staff and students had previously been using a platform based on Sun’s ONE email system, but staff were migrated onto Microsoft Exchange last year. Asked whether staff could be moved into a similar Microsoft cloud email environment such as its Business Productivity Online Suite eventually, Cahill said “anything’s possible”, but such a switch wasn’t on the immediate agenda.

Google’s rival Gmail solution is likely to receive a deal of attention next week, when the search giant is holding a press event in Sydney to disclose two new additions to its list of organisations which have adopted its offering and “gone Google”. The briefing will be led by Amit Singh, the company’s vice president of international sales and operations for its enterprise division.

Image credit: Robert Scoble, Creative Commons

Five reasons Australian email belongs in the cloud

Renai LeMay — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:51:29 +0000

opinion If your company or organisation is not currently considering migrating its email systems onto a cloud computing platform, then you’re in danger of being left behind.

That’s the conclusion I have reached after six months of closely following the Australian technology sector’s growing fascination with cloud computing, in all its variants and according to all the different definitions.

There’s a lot of hype around cloud computing at the moment. Giant companies like Fujitsu, CSC, Microsoft and more are jumping headstrong into the cloud as fast as they can, following the lead set by early cloud enthusiasts like Salesforce.com and Google.

Giant private sector companies like the Commonwealth Bank of Australia have spent a great deal of time and effort examining how cloud computing will affect their business. And even the conservative public sector is fascinated by the same topic.

Not all of the various hyped aspects of cloud computing will come to fruition. But of those, it looks like email will be the first one to really deliver on cloud computing’s promises of delivering a cheaper, more flexible and more innovative future than traditional IT infrastructure models have offered.

So whether you’re a skeptic or a believer, here are five reasons why your organisation should shift its corporate email platform into the cloud — as soon as possible.

1. Everyone else doing it: Just a few years ago, it was a rarity to find an Australian organisation which had migrated its email system onto a cloud computing platform. But over the past two years, things have drastically changed.

The email norm for new small businesses in 2010 is to setup a Google account and supply your employees with Gmail, and more and more companies are “going Google” in this way. In the education sector, it’s a similar case — almost every unversity has already picked a cloud email solution from Microsoft or Google over the past several years for students, and several education departments have as well.

In the corporate and public sectors, things are a little more unclear, but several high-profile customers — AMP, AAPT and this week Coca-Cola Amatil — have recently flagged migrations. And in the government sector NBN Co set tongues wagging when it opted for a hosted Exchange implementation upon its creation in mid-2009.

2. Local servers: There are now several companies — notably, CSC, which won its first high-profile cloud email client in AMP — providing cloud email solutions with servers hosted in Australia instead of in offshore datacentres (the kind that raise tricky data sovereignty issues).

Google still won’t host a Gmail datacentre in Australia, however. But some customers have expressly stated they don’t see it as a problem.

3. Generation Y is increasingly demanding it: Australia’s impatient internet generation has no patience for those that don’t get how the online environment is changing their lives, and is increasingly reaching management level after being born in the 1980′s.

Do you really want to be the IT manager who tells their top staff that they can’t access their email from whatever device they want — and that you can’t upgrade the server to Exchange 2010 because you don’t have the budget? Cloud email was made to solve all of these problems.

And if the server goes down, you can blame the vendor.

4. It’s cheaper — and sometimes free: Australian education sector chief information officers couldn’t believe how cheap it was to migrate their students onto Gmail and Live@EDU — it was almost as if they were being paid by the vendors to do so.

Now that phenomenon is coming to the rest of the market. Many small Australian companies can already get Google Apps for their domain name for free, and even if you do end up paying for the premium version, it’s only $50 per user per year.

If you factor in the extra time you won’t have to spend administering your own servers and the ease of use services like Gmail provide, you’ll quickly realise what the ROI is: Awesome. It’s not quite as good (as far as we can see) when it comes to Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite — but it’s probably still better than running your own Exchange server.

5. It’s a good excuse to finally get rid of Lotus Notes.

There are still a stack of Lotus Notes/Domino installations hanging around in Australian organisations. And while most CEOs won’t fork out for a migration off Lotus to a rival platform just to keep up with staff expectations, they will do so if you can demonstrate (through the cost and flexibility advantages of cloud) that it’s financially worth doing so.

If you can cut costs (or shift them into the operational budget) and keep staff happy and productive, the CEO and the board will fork out for a cloud email migration.

We don’t have anything against Lotus Notes, by the way. It remains a great email platform. But the email market is increasingly coalescing into a two-horse race around the more modern Gmail and Exchange platforms.

Image credit: Grzesiek Hidden, royalty free

CIOs speak: Is cloud email a bumpy ride?

Renai LeMay — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:42:12 +0000

Australian chief information officers have been making eyes at cloud-based email solutions from Google and Microsoft for a while now.

Gmail, Live@EDU, BPOS are the sleek new hotness cruising down the freeway, while Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino are sulking in the back garage like the bulky family sedan nobody really likes to drive.

But with relatively few case studies on the ground, what do CIOs who have made the switch think about the technology so far, and do they recommend it to others?

Financial services group Mortgage Choice last year switched about 1,000 users from its existing Lotus Notes platform to Gmail. The group’s CIO Neil Rose-Innes is broadly very positive about the company’s move, although he admits cloud email might not be for everyone.

“It’s not necessarily going to suit every organisation, but every CIO should be looking at opportunities to trial or pilot cloud-based or web-delivered solutions,” he says in a recent interview. “That’s where the industry is going.”

Mortgage Choice made the switch after a six-month evaluation trial of Gmail. The company broadly operates on a franchise model, with the head office providing line of business applications out to staff in the field.

Rose-Innes says the company “obviously” found things that were of interest to it in the due diligence process, but at the end of the trial it determined that it suited the company’s needs.

“The decision for us was very clear,” he says. “The benefit that it delivered in the short and long term is evident — both from an end user [point of view], as well as reduced support overhead, less in-house infrastructure and so on … It’s now an enterprise-grade solution, in my view.”

Despite the radical change in technology as Mortgage Choice shifted from a desktop email suite like Lotus Notes to a cloud solution like Gmail, Rose-McInnes says the shift to Gmail was actually less about the technological migration itself and more about educating users about how it worked.

“We had a huge focus on the change management piece,” he said. “It’s understanding that users were going from a client install of a significantly mature enterprise-grade tool that had a million features of which you use seven … [to Gmail, which has] 127 features that are most likely to be useful to you on an ongoing basis.”

It’s a similar situation at Sydney University, which last year migrated some 46,000 students onto Microsoft’s Live@EDU platform.

In a recent interview, CIO Bruce Meikle says on the whole the university’s migration went “really well”. “With a large student base you will always get some queries and complaints, but in terms of a transition, for us it was really smooth,” he says.

“The students really are getting a significantly better service than we had been offering. For us to offer that level of infrastructure, storage and so on would be kind of prohibitive.”

Sydney Uni didn’t offer to transfer students’ archived email across to the new platform, so the biggest impact it saw from an IT perspective was the need to provision tens of thousands of accounts, using its student database.

“But using our identity management system, it was not too difficult,” says Meikle. “You can reasonably well automate the switch-over. Now, as students enrol their accounts are automatically created for them in the cloud.”

Meikle says as an organisation, if you were rolling out a new email platform, “you would have to seriously consider” a cloud option. You wouldn’t necessarily go down that path if you were looking to upgrade an existing platform, he says, but if you had to change your email platform completely, you’d look at it.

Addressing the downside
Both CIOs acknowledge there had been questions about issues like data security and privacy in the cloud, in addition to the debate about where the email data was actually stored. But these issues, they said, could be worked through.

“In our case the data is not in Singapore, it’s in the US,” says Meikle, noting the university had received “the usual questions about the US Patriot Act” and so on.

However, the CIO pointed out in Sydney University’s case, the email data was a service offered by the university to students and subject to a reasonable use policy anyway. “If you were going to do something [illegal], surely you wouldn’t use something that was so clearly identifiable to you,” he said, adding that many students used the free Hotmail or Gmail platforms for their private email anyway — which have the same questions around offshore storage.

Mortgage Choice’s Rose-Innes says he has had conversations with other CIOs about cloud email. “Some of the individuals sitting around the table said ‘It just doesn’t work for us’,” he says, noting they had privacy issues with where email was stored.

However, the CIO said privacy worries were usually more a problem “in concept than reality”.

Mortgage Choice’s contract with Google, he says, states that all the data data belongs to Mortgage Choice and could only be released under subpoena by the US government. “Global organisations have intellectual property and data floating around the globe anyway,” he says. “I’m not sure that it’s much of an issue — maybe an issue for a Federal Government or a state government.”

Rose-Innes sees the decision to move to Gmail as a commercial decision, and he acknowledges that all commercial decisions have upsides — but also potential risks.

He says the risk of data leakage through the cloud email platform is “fairly high” over a long period of time, but the impact of that over a long period would be very small.
“It’s really a commercial decision. In every business, you need to take some form of commercial risk,” he says.

Rose-Innes also points out a provider like Google would do “everything possible” to avoid data breaches, as it would affect their business, and that because of its scale, Google had much deeper expertise in security than Mortgage Choice’s in-house staff would be able to provide.

Another question is to what extent the email data hosted with Microsoft or Google needs to be backed up, and how that process would take place.

Rose-Innes says Google doesn’t “back up” data precisely — instead the data is replicated across multiple servers live. “There is never a need for recovery because it’s always online,” he says. “Google’s approach is that they don’t ever delete anything; it’s always available. The backup issue is not an issue for us at all.”

Rose-Innes also pointed out the Google Message Discovery service allows users to access even deleted email for up to ten years afterwards. “It gives you access to anything,” he says.

Image credit: Agata Urbaniak, royalty free

Cloud email’s Australian thunderstorm

Renai LeMay — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:19:33 +0000

On 11 January this year, Macquarie University issued a statement that left Australia’s IT industry in no doubt as to how the institution felt about its ageing in-house email systems.

“We were spending a significant amount of money each year maintaining our own inferior email infrastructure that, despite our best efforts, was falling further and further behind staff expectations,” said the university’s vice chancellor Steven Schwartz. “That’s money we would much prefer to spend on better teaching and research facilities for our staff and students, or on scholarships enabling students from disadvantaged backgrounds to access a university education.”

The net result of that stark evaluation? Macquarie is currently in the process of dumping its in-house Novell GroupWise email infrastructure and moving 6,000 staff to Google’s Gmail platform; a move that comes after the university already shifted some 68,000 students into Google’s cloud.

Some may find such a switch dramatic and risky. After all, many questions abound about security, privacy and the degree to which cloud computing/vendor-hosted email platforms offer a sophisticated enough platform to be compared with a traditional email solution.

And yet, Macquarie’s tale is a story that is becoming increasingly common in Australian organisations as many re-evaluate just what they want from an email platform, what they truly need or would settle for, and often most importantly, what they’re prepared to pay.

The switchers
Google’s marketing spiel for its cloud computing platform exhorts organisations to dump their legacy infrastructure and “Go Google” with the search giant’s Apps suite — Gmail, calendaring, messaging, an office suite, and web site creation and hosting.

And in Australia (and over the river at our Kiwi neighbour), many organisations have done just that.

In the corporate sector, AAPT revealed in November last year that it had decided to use Google Apps for its 1,300 staff, with the telco’s chief operating officer David Yuile saying the choice was towards a fundamentally new way of working. Just one month earlier it was home loan company Mortgage Choice making the switch, moving 1,000 users onto Gmail.

In July the Postal Service Group of NZ Post shifted 2100 users over. And even the Commonwealth Bank of Australia has examined Google’s offering — as early as February 2007 — but ultimately found the product wanting.

“Absolutely, we’re seeing it every day,” says Google’s Asia-Pacific head of market development Deepak Ramanathan, when asked if Google has swapped out any instances of the dominant corporate email platform, Microsoft Exchange, in non-educational Australian institutions. “We see that the line between the person at work and person at home is disappearing, and we see people demand the same web applications they use in their personal life at work, so this change is happening fast.”

But it’s in the education sector that Gmail has really found its home.

The NSW Department of Education and Training has migrated 1.3 million students to Gmail, dumping one of the world’s largest implementations of Microsoft Exchange to do so. Monash University and Adelaide University are other examples of institutions that have also pulled big numbers for the search giant, with 58,000 and 16,000 students apiece being shifted across.

“Interest in the cloud in general and in Gmail in particular is certainly high in Australia,” says Ramanathan. “At a recent forum we arranged for CIOs from some of Australia’s largest businesses, it was clear that talk has shifted to when and how to migrate to the cloud, given that the event was easily fully subscribed … we were turning people away.”

The flipside for the the search giant, of course, is that so far Google has not yet — that anyone knows of — managed to convert staff accounts in the tens of thousands at any Australian organisation, despite its success in the education sector. And even in that education sector, despite Google’s stunning success, it has had its progress limited by that most unlikely of cloud adversaries — Microsoft.

If you were to make a list of Australian educational institutions who have recently migrated their student base to a cloud email platform, Microsoft’s Live@EDU system would be just as prominent on that list as Gmail — and probably even more so.

Over the past several years, Edith Cowan University, Flinders University, TAFE South Australia, Curtin University, WA Central TAFE, Sydney University and the Australian Catholic University have all migrated their student bodies onto Live@EDU. And many of those institutions have picked Microsoft in the last 12 months.

There is some degree of history repeating itself to be found in the massive wave of Microsoft migrations to cloud email platforms in Australia’s education sector. If you ask corporate workers what they think of Microsoft Outlook, many will reply that they dislike the software, but find it essential for daily use. And, of course, Microsoft has achieved dominance in that field — a 2009 survey by Australian analyst firm Longhaus found 53 percent of organisations surveyed used Outlook/Exchange as their primary email platform.

It’s a similar situation when it comes to the migration to cloud email platforms in Australia’s education sector. A recent protest held by students at Sydney University, for example, focused on the fact that they didn’t like Microsoft’s Live@EDU platform. And the encroachment of Microsoft software into the University of NSW’s traditionally Linux-dominated School of Computer Science and Engineering has been met with open hostility.

But increasingly, Australia’s education sector appears to have taken a strong slant towards Microsoft’s Live@EDU platform over the past twelve months, eclipsing Gmail’s early successes. Of course, the company’s hosted Exchange solution — the corporate equivalent of Live@EDU and part of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite — does not appear to be gaining as much headway on office desktops. But Microsoft’s strength in cloud email in general is now undisputable.

The rationale
If you’re an IT manager outside the education sector, you might very well be asking yourself why the universities and education departments have moved their students so strongly onto cloud email platforms, when mainstream government departments and private enterprises (with a few exceptions) have so far preferred to maintain their in-house systems.

According to Steve Hodgkinson, the director of analyst firm Ovum’s government practice, it’s all about need.

Universities, he points out, currently are compelled to make a strategic decision on email as their “severely outdated” student email platforms reach end of life. In 2010, he says, any forced decision on email infrastructure would need to closely examine the cloud alternatives due to their advantages compared with the legacy style of in-house platforms.

“To be frank,” he says, “if you were making a strategic decision to change your email platform [in 2010], serious questions would have to be asked if you opted for an in-house solution. There would have to be a strong security driver.”

In contrast, Hodgkinson says, not many government agencies and private enterprises are in the position of being forced to change their email platform. Usually, changes in email platforms come across through mergers and acquisitions — for example, a company using Lotus Notes shifting away from it as it merges with another company using Microsoft Exchange.

“There’s no real case for idly entertaining the case of maybe changing the email system,” Hodgkinson says. “Your back’s got to be against the wall in some way to make you do that.”

There is one case where organisations have an in-house email system and have their back against the wall anyway, he says: If an organisation is using Novell GroupWise, which is speedily getting left behind in a very competitive market. Hence Macquarie’s speedy switch.

Another reason why organisations switch to cloud email platforms, according to Hodgkinson, is where they have a serious lack of in-house skills. “Don’t use cloud computing for things in your organisation that are already working fine,” he says. “Cloud computing creates new options for bits and pieces that are broken. Some organisations do have broken email systems … they have reached a point where they need to focus their energies on applications that add business value.”

One final motivation for switching is also clear. Education CIOs agree that the sorts of financial arrangements that Microsoft and Google have offered IT chiefs to bring their thousands of students across to cloud email platforms have been just too good to pass up.

The next step
If you accept Hodgkinson’s argument, it’s easy to foresee a future — at least in the medium term — where most large Australian organisations outside the education sector will remain reluctant to switch to a cloud email platform. There’s simply no immediate need, and without that need, as the analyst says, “it’s not something many CIOs would consider lightly”.

However, some argue the decision to migrate to cloud email systems won’t come as a big bang process, but more like a creeping vine.

Longhaus managing director Peter Carr is able to give a number of examples where cloud email platforms — particularly consumer-grade offerings such as Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or the freely available Gmail — are speedily making their way into semi-official use in Australian organisations.

Just last week it was revealed that Qantas was planning to dump its Lotus Notes/Domino staff email system for Microsoft Exchange/Outlook.

However Carr says the far more interesting internal email migration was the decision some time ago to stop providing Qantas flight attendants with an official company email account. Instead, he says, the flight attendants simply provide Qantas’ HR staff with their own personal email address — “Hotmail or Gmail or something like that”. They are then paid an annual fee for their professional use of personal technology.

The reason this system works, according to Carr, is the low volume of official company email Qantas flight attendants need to deal with — just work schedules and so on. Most other official company communications can go through the unions. Effectively, Qantas has outsourced part of its corporate email platform to Hotmail.

It’s a similar situation in emerging nations such as exist in the Pacific Islands.

Carr says many Governments in the Pacific Islands never got around to implementing their own in-house email systems as most westernised countries did in the 1990′s. The reason? Poor infrastructure and a lack of skills meant it was usually easier for public servants to sign up for a free email account from Hotmail or similar, and use it for normal government work.

“You’ll find email servers over there, but they’ve probably got a pot plant sitting on them or something like that,” says Carr. “They’re actually just skipping the middle bit, saying: ‘Screw it, we’ll just go straight to cloud’.”

When you extrapolate this phenomenon into different Australian sectors, you can predict some drastic shifts in employee behaviour when it comes to use of IT systems. For example, Carr highlights the fact that many nurses — essentially low-level public servants — enter the hospital system through doing unpaid practical work during their degree.

“They don’t get paid, so they don’t need a corporate email account,” he says. “They basically show up to their shift. These students will have their own cloud-based email accounts” — Hotmail, Gmail and the like.

As those students transition into professional employment, Carr points out, they will often work casually at multiple hospitals and for nursing agencies. This means they won’t need permanent corporate email accounts and could potentially spend much of their career simply using their personal Hotmail option instead.

“You could probably come up with a list of 5-6 things, which show that it makes no sense for hospitals to come up with collaborative platform and email servers for their support staff,” he says. “It’s a massive cost to take out of the health system.”

Once the business case expands past Qantas to the healthcare sector, Carr can imagine it going elsewhere. “How could they not employ similar policies in counter workers in things like service centres and so on?” he asks. The analyst calls this type of staff “boundary workers”, because they work on the edges of the corporate technology footprint.

Extrapolation
Applying Carr’s analysis to Australia’s education sector, it’s possible that it was so easy for so many institutions to switch to cloud-based solutions like Gmail and Live@EDU because for universities, students are more or less on the boundaries of the their IT infrastructure. They’re not specialised, high-end users. They just get a bulk service that is battened down to cope with potential security breaches and demand.

But this same analogy raises questions about the future of staff email at Australia’s largest organisations. After all, Macquarie University was one institution that proved what worked on the boundaries would work at the centre as well.

Or, to put it in more colloquial terms — what’s good for the goose might also be good … for the gander. It will be interesting to see just how many Australian employees are living the cloud full-time, this time next year.

Image credit: Mek Kormik, Google, Microsoft (respectively)