Autumn letters
It’s the season of harvest, and a great time to reflect on where we’re at with Project Mercury and the [...]
Posted on April 26th, 2010 by marc
It’s the season of harvest, and a great time to reflect on where we’re at with Project Mercury and the GMail seeds we’ve sewn this year. It’s oddly appropos that our progress might be articulated by the famous German poet Rainer Maria Rilke:
Who now has no house, wil not build one (anymore).
Who now is alone, will remain so for long,
will wake, and read, and write long letters
and back and forth on the boulevards
will restlessly wander, while the leaves blow.
Herbsttag (Autumn Day)
In a mere three months since inception Project Mercury has met all its targets and reached a critical halfway point in reaching every staff email box. As of today 3133 staff have made the switch to GMail, we now use only 500 of over 15,000 Gigabytes of storage and the system delivers 99.999% uptime while sending 200,000 messages and receiving 100,000 daily. More importantly, though we’ve learned from missteps along the way, we’re getting rave reviews.
None of this would be possible without three critical success factors: the skill and dedication of Team Mercury, cooperative spirit and effort of the United Federation of Infoservices (aka the faculty and departmental IT departments), and of course the enthusiasm and positivity of Macquarie University staff.
At this milestone I extend thanks and congratulations generally to the Informatics team and the Federation for the results to date. These people have worked ridiculous hours together harmoniously and effectively for the good of MQU. It is noticed and appreciated. Particular recognition is due to both Program Manager Tim Abbott and Project Manager Adam Shah for charting the course as well as meeting the standard set by Project Mercury staff and Federation ambassadors and teams alike.
Coincidentally, the Council of Australian Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT) asked MQU to brief them in the context of a best practice exemplar.
This PDF of a Keynote presentation I made on 23 April 2010 was the result; in addition to territory familiar to the gentle reader of my earlier post Mercury, swift messenger of Olympus there is additional and new material that covers some additional rationale, progress to date, experiential reference and a few customer testamonials.
Omitted from the PDF for reasons of size and format is an animated timeline visualisation as was projected at the beginning of April. Here’s an H.264 encoded 640×480 pixel MPEG4 weighing in at 15.1Mb. Please contact me if interested in a higher fidelity rendition.
Email. Killer app for Cloud.
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Comments
Great presentation on a great project - roll on migrations!
KathyS - April 29, 2010
Great presentation, I can't wait until OFM moves to gmail! I am interested to read about potential for the University to use Google Wave, I know the Wave team are in communication with Monash as the first University trial of Wave. I believe they (the Wave team) would really like to specialise in education. As we are already on Gmail and closer to the Wave teams base (Sydney) I think we might be a better pilot ground. Do you think there is much chance of the University taking on Wave? When Wave came out I got invitations for people within the marketing team and they seemed quite keen...?
Hilary Bekmann - April 30, 2010
I would like to re-iterate that I think claiming GMail is an advertising-free zone is misleading. As far as I can tell, Google will use the data they collect from our uni email accounts to advertise to us in other places. Since Google is everywhere on the web via ad-words, our involvement actually means we are better targeted with ads, even if we are not seeing more ads. I am not saying the move the GMail is a bad idea, just that I think we are kidding ourselves about advertising. All this is without even considering the rights Google have reserved to advertise to use directly in certain circumstances.
Still, thanks for the update, and thanks for the good work during the transition. It all seems to be going very smoothly. Undoubtably due to good work from skilled people in Informatics.
Tom - April 30, 2010
Hey Hilary, thanks for taking an interest!
MQU opened negotiations with Google about Wave back in 2009 actually, but there are a number of factors hindering progress:
- Wave is/was a bubble that exists outside of the context of GMail. This is acknowledged as the largest barrier to adoption by Google - you can safely assume this is being worked on
- Google wasn't ready for us to go prime time.
- There are issues over data patriotism we negotiated for GMail that need to be resolved for Wave.
Will have to check out status with Monash but I don't think there's been sufficient movement here just yet for us.
Plus - I'd kind of like to get Project Mercury done and dusted as a prerequisite. Agree?
- Marc
marc - May 2, 2010
Fair concerns Tom, but we spent a lot of time on legals and your suspicions, whilst understandable and ones I initially shared, are specifically excluded by our agreement.
Here is Google's commitment to us:
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=107810
marc - May 2, 2010
marc,
My reading of their third caveat:
"Email is scanned so we can display contextually relevant advertising in some circumstances."
would be that they use data from our email to advertise to us.
Matt
Tom - May 2, 2010
Tom/Matt (I'm confused since you're profile is Tom but your .sig is Matt),
We further asked this question during negotiations:
MQU representative:
"Confirm there isn't any smart ad serving which uses apps indexing to decide which ads to show on other sites? I ask this specifically because people think that this is the case!"
Google negotiator response:
"Yes in my understanding this is correct".
I'll admit this is qualified as a personal understanding so it's potentially unenforceable, but we considered this reasonable and in good faith.
At the end of the day, even if this were not the case and personally targeted advertising outside of Gmail is the price to pay for world class email at almost zero cost, I'll happily take responsibility for that judgement call.
marc - May 2, 2010
I think you have very certainly made the right decision. 99% percent of people will happily take that trade-off. However, I am in the 1% (in fact, probably more like 0.1%) that will not.
Tom ;)
Tom - May 2, 2010
Hi Marc
A lot of the credit goes to the vision and the determination you have brought to MU.
Our guys on the project have found Adam a great Project Manager to work for and this has also helped.
Congratulations...
Anthony Scander - May 3, 2010
I have managed to distill my thoughts on why I am such a pedant about the privacy claims we have been given about the gmail switch.
With companies like Google, nothing is private. If you happily accept this, then Google is for you. If you don't, it is not.
The assurances of _any_ level of privacy always contain a get-out clause for the company and are rarely worth much anyway, as the recent facebook debacle and Google WiFi problems show. I am slowly coming around to the idea that I should just give up on the idea of having private data. What I think is a bad idea is to engage a company that by default treats all data as theirs, but to extract assurances that we will be treated differently. Accept nothing is private and move on. I am trying to do this as we speak.
Tom - May 23, 2010
It is interesting how Google and its recent misses on privacy with Buzz and WiFi is being reflected by higher ed decisions on email and productivity apps for their students.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/biggest-us-cloud-deployment-kills-google-apps-for-education/5211?tag=mantle_skin;content
Any student leaving university also wants to be equipped with skills to use the tools being provided in the public sector and private sector and we don't live in a vacuum so sorry Google isn't it.
Hubi - June 5, 2010