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University of California opt Gmail over Office 365
By siliconindia
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Bangalore: The UC Berkeley came out in open, elucidating its decision to choose Gmail for its campus email services. This would connect around 70,000 users across the University.
Over the past months, it had witnessed a series of email system crashes, especially one that halted the services for nearly 50 hours. The Vice Chancellor for Administration and Finance, John Wilton sent an email to the university's fraternity mentioning about the substantial cost reductions to a tune of $75,000 every year, after the migration to Google Apps.
The soaring popularity of Google products among a vast majority of students and more importantly, a substantial reduction in deployment time for Google Apps has enticed the university. The new system would require around six to ten weeks to be deployed. Additionally, more users are acquainted with Google APIs than Microsoft's. Further, the fact that other universities have already shifted to Gmail has given an impetus for UC at Berkeley.
Hence there wouldn't be any consultations with Microsoft support, which could act detrimental in being cost efficient. Hence, there would be readily available support during IT breakdowns and similar catastrophes. The major setback for Office 365 was its overhead that needed an onsite Cloud premise, upon which Microsoft's Exchange server was to be installed, before deploying the mail service.
In the midst of it, there were some skeptics who questioned the need to go for a campus email service, which could require resources while there exists a wide range of mail services and it would be benevolent for the users to opt one according to his/her own volition.