Two different presentations this afternoon—the dominant one was live@edu which took so much time that there was little time left to see the presentation on infrastructure optimization—the latter is where the real follow-ups are—we can complete a significant survey which will tell us where we are with respect to infrastructure optimization. Brad Anderson (see my previous posting) related Infrastructure Optimization to significant differences in Total Cost of Ownership—significant savings on a per PC basis, and something we should be thinking very carefully about—how much is it worth spending on infrastructure optimization given the ultimate cost savings. The assessment is here: http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/bizinfra/ac/bpio.mspx The UK HE folks at Microsoft will help us to also get the third party survey that allows us to assess total cost of ownership.
The breadth of the live@edu offering is quite significant—though the speaker was very up-front that the offering is not going to provide the best student experience, but may provide the cheapest. Given the other (e-mail) discussions about push-mail during the day, I asked some questions about whether and how the experience could be split, and they do expect that live@edu might be a student offering without it being a faculty and staff offering. It provides e-mail (via hotmail); shared calendar; messenger; document collaboration; shared filestore and sharepoint-like workspace. Their profit model is through the search engine—if you search for something through the site, then the search page will have sponsorship—advertising—but everything else is ad-free and free.
One possibility would be to offer this as e-mail for life to alumni—but they do not expect this to be anyone's primary e-mail address, and they do accept that students do tend to flit from one e-mail address to the next—but hope/pray that their spam filters will solve that problem… I am not convinced. Spam seems to come in waves as the war between spammers and filters continued. You only need one wave to hit while alumni are using live@edu and they switch to another e-mail and we have lost them…
The other problem with offering the service only to alumni is that we don't get them used to the experience while they are at the university, so our confidence in their continued use of the service is low…
My inclination is to skip live@edu, but I am more than willing to continue a green hat discussion if that's what people want to do.
3 comments:
I have to say that I don't really "get" this whole e-mail for life thing. I don't see the attraction of keeping a university-branded e-mail address after leaving. I know it's been spoken about for a while now, but have we actually done any research in terms of what kind of take-up we would have (e.g. whether existing students think it would be something they would use)? Most people I know used their university e-mail address for university-related activities. After leaving university, these activities are likely to be very rare, and I suspect that most people will stay in touch with friends via social networking sites, and personal e-mail.
The only other possible attraction I can see is if we were able to offer more features and / or a nicer interface (subjective) than other popular e-mail providers (Google, Hotmail, ISPs)...is this likely??
Actually, there are some key measures of the university's success based on contact with students after they leave--specifically, what theya re doing six months after they leave. So it is in our interests that we stay in contact. After that, it is about recruiting new students and getting alumni donations--again in our interests. E-mail for life is about finding the right value proposition for people so that they stay in contact with us. Make sense?
It does make sense, and I understand the need to stay in touch (particularly for DLHE, though I think they currently contact via post). I'm just not convinced that offering people another means of sending and receiving e-mail is the way to go...unless there is real value in it for the student / graduate. Otherwise I suspect that even if there was a decent amount of take-up in the beginning, it could quickly be neglected and would not remain an effective means of communication - perhaps even less so than their last-known personal e-mail address.
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