40,000 Arizona State University Students Adopt Google Apps
InformationWeek reports on some exciting news: Arizona State University has moved 40,000 students and faculty to Google Apps and will migrate the rest of its 65,000 students as well as the remaining faculty and staff later this year.
They are currently using the email and calendar services, and will roll out Google Docs in the near future as well.
“Initially offering new e-mail accounts based on Google’s Gmail service (but retaining the “asu.edu” domain) on an opt-in basis, Sannier and his team found that students were making the switch at the rate of around 300 per hour. Today, more than 40,000 ASU students and faculty have made the switch, and he expects to shut down the University’s in-house mail servers near the end of this term. Since the e-mail switch-over, Sannier has been rolling out additional applications including calendar (which users can now share online, a capability the old university system didn’t have), IM, and search. Within the next two months he expects to offer personalized home pages as well as online word-processing documents and spreadsheets based on Google Apps.
The cost to ASU: zero.”