Questions for schools that outsourced "students only" to Google for Education??

Hi Michael,

Some answers:

>>Are there any colleges/universities out there that have outsourced student e-mail ONLY to Google – and are automatically provisioning student e-mail accounts on Google?? 

Yes. We had 2 separate Exchange environments: one for students and one for employees. These days employees still use Exchange, and students use Google Apps for Education Gmail. We also enabled Gmail for alumni.

>>And if so – would you be willing to talk to us and explain to us exactly how you are managing this account provisioning process? 

I can put you in touch with our system administrator. To begin with, we had already defined “what is a student” and had access to that data from our system of record. We also had to define “what are alumni?” Then we integrated this with our identity management system and some code to provision the accounts on a regular basis through the provisioning interface Google makes available.

>>Are you using canned Google tools?.....or did you have to write custom code? 

I believe we used a combination of canned Google tools + some custom code to make it all work well. The initial load of students took a long time, and we had some problems with failed provisioning (requests would fail, so we had to send re-tries multiple times), I think a lot has been sorted out already, and I believe it’s running smoothly.

>>What kind of domain structure are you running to facilitate this automatic account provisioning?

I believe we use a single AD domain now. Our sys admin can verify.

Thanks
Peter

Hi Micah, (et al…)

First off – thanks for the info regarding your outsourcing of student e-mail to Google, and the generous offer to endure our questions…..we’ll most likely take you (and several other kind folks!!) up on that offer…..

Secondly – I’m curious as to why you school would be considering adding Office365?  Is it just to offer a selection?.....or is there another “driver” that’s encouraging you in that direction?  Instructional issues?  Student preference?

Thanks again…..

Michael

We have also outsourced student email only to Google and are automatically provisioning student accounts there. We have an internally-built account creation tool that creates accounts on various systems, so we programmed a module for Google that uses their APIs to create the accounts.