Thesis
Our thesis was simple: we wanted to know what email system/solution the ‘elite’ colleges in the U.S. were running. We were also curious to see to what extent Google’s Apps for Education and Microsoft’ Live@EDU managed to penetrate this market.
Conclusion
To be honest, we were somewhat surprised to learn that the by far most popular email system among the ‘elite’ schools was Microsoft Exchange. Fifteen (15) of the schools surveyed used Microsoft Exchange. However, it should be noted that many schools appears to be running Exchange in parallel with another system. Since we have no data on the distribution of users among the different systems, we simply counted both (or all) systems. The second most popular email server was Cyrus with eight (8) schools, closely followed by Dovecot, Google Apps, Sun Java SMS and Zimbra, all with seven (7) schools each.
It is clear that Google’s Apps for Education has been doing a much better job penetrating this market than Microsoft with its Live@EDU. Among all the schools surveyed, only one school (Washington University in St. Louis) is running Live@EDU exclusively. The only other school using Live@EDU, University of Washington, also offers Google Apps. They simply allow their students to pick which one of the two they prefer.
It should also be known that there was a significant number of email servers (13 to be precise) that we were unable to identify. In a number of these cases we could make an educated guess, but we decided to leave them in the ‘unknown’ category just to be safe.
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Let’s face it — having to reset the users’ password when doing an e-mail migration is a big pain-point. End-users don’t like having their passwords changed, and the tech-folks don’t like the storm of support calls from frustrated users who can’t get to their email. That is on top of the issues that might arise when users changes their password from the password the admin changed it to mid-migration.