On Thu, Nov 08, 2007 at 05:05:39PM -0600, Blake Hudson wrote: > Gary Mills wrote: > > We have a moderate-sized Cyrus system for 30,000 students and 3000 > > employees. ... I know that CMU and other universities want > > to maintain their own e-mail systems. What's the justification in > > these cases? > > >From a security perspective, you maintain control and privacy of your > and your user's data. This is one of the main reasons why many people > run their own services, not limited to mail (www,db, instant messaging, > etc). Whether it is the perceived value or because of other obligations > with regard to privacy/security this alone is often justification to > maintain a mail server in-house. There's also the business perspective > of cost, especially cost over time. Thanks everyone for your responses. I don't want to clutter up this technical mailing list with more management issues, although I'd certainly be pleased to receive personal e-mail on this topic. There appear to be two types of outsourcing. The Google example was one where all of the e-mail resided on an external site. In addition to the issues mentioned above, there is authentication and backup/restore to consider. For all of those reasons, I don't think that this type will be suitable here. The Zimbra example, however, was one where a contractor was hired to install a new e-mail system at the university, and to do the migration and management. This one I could see happening here, so that people with programming and development skills would no longer need to be kept on staff. That seems like a bizarre idea to me. It's essentially outsourcing the employees. Since there are no problems whatsoever with the existing Cyrus system, I suppose that contracting with a company to maintain and manage it might be better than just abandoning it. -- -Gary Mills- -Unix Support- -U of M Academic Computing and Networking- ---- Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
