KUALA LUMPUR: Open University Malaysia has migrated its e-mail system to Google's Gmail, a free Web-based e-mail service from the Internet search giant.
The university announced that the move was completed in August last year and allows it to save thousands of ringgit in maintenance costs.
It also allows each student 5GB of storage space for e-mail messages, compared to just 10MB that was available on the previous system.
In addition to that, the university adopted the Google Applications for Education suite, which amongst other things, lets it push out timetables to students and tutors online.
Its students can also collaborate by doing their group coursework using Google Docs, a Web-based office suite.
“The problem we had before was that we were spending upwards of RM20,000 to RM30,000 a year on antivirus and antispam services when we hosted the e-mail server ourselves,” said Ishar Ismail, the university's datacentre administrator.
“Also, our 3-terabyte server had already reached 80% capacity.” It would have cost quite a lot to upgrade server capacity.
Going with Google Apps, the university managed to keep all its e-mail addresses as they were, and migrated more 60,500 accounts, comprising 58,000 students, 500 staff and 2,000 tutors.
With help from Google's online support team, it completed the migration in just two weeks.
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