Outsourcing facets of IT operations to reduce costs and improve flexibility is increasingly common across university and college administrations, which regularly deal with changing conditions and limited financial resources. One component that is a prime candidate for outsourcing is campus e-mail, an area now being aggressively targeted by two leading Web-based e-mail providers, Google and Microsoft, with education-specific solutions.

Why Outsource Campus E-mail?

Due to annual influxes of new students and departures of graduating classes, postsecondary institutions deal with regularly changing messaging requirements. For IT departments, this corresponds to the frequent creation of new e-mail accounts, and either the deletion, or more commonly, the indefinite maintenance, of others. As a result of this disproportionately high administrative load, universities and colleges stand to be key potential beneficiaries of several e-mail outsourcing advantages, including:

• Improved scalability. E-mail service providers manage a vast number of customers across a shared infrastructure and, from a capacity and process management standpoint, are better suited to deal with frequent capacity...