Auckland Uni sticks with Microsoft - to be on the right side of the law

Even as it bags yet another big tertiary mega-deal - this time, 16,000 students at the University of Adelaide -  Google is finding Microsoft hard to dislodge at the University of Auckland. The reason may surprise you.

Google’s Applications suite, popularly known as Google Apps, and sold for around $75 per user per year in its commercial version, is proving popular with universities. No wonder, a special education edition is offered free to tertiary institutions.

Sure, the regular version of Google Apps is also free, but the education edition offers frills, such as a special version of Google Calendar with key dates in the university calendar marked up.

While the University of Adelaide deal is big, it doesn’t include staff, and is restricted to email and calendaring at this point.

Google scored a more expansive deal with the University of Auckland in July last year, which gave both staff and students the option to use Gmail and Calendar, plus Google Apps such as Docs (Google’s alternative to Microsoft Word).

Nine months on, I checked in with University of Auckland electronic campus manager Matthew Coker, to see how the mega –rollout (involving some 50,000 students and staff) was going.

Mr Coker said around 20,000 students had opted to move to Gmail, whose 7GB of storage dwarfs that offered by the university’s old system. And an untracked number of staff are using Google Docs to collaborate on documents, and share information.

But for staff, Gmail, Google Docs and other Google Apps remain a dual option with Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office.

Mr Coker’s reason: the University of Auckland, like other large public organisations, will be covered by the Public Records Act from next year, when the first elements of the legislation come into force.

The act was originally passed in 2007, but the public sector has been given a long lead time to upgrade their systems to be in compliance with its requirements.

The legislation is designed to improve public sector accountability, and mandates that all government departments and public sector bodies must adopt formal electronic and hard copy record keeping standards, including auditable logs of all electronic communication.

Mr Coker is only confident the university will be in compliance with the Public Records Act if it maintains Microsoft Exchange and Office: “We can’t have any files in the cloud.”