[K12OSN] Emails for large districts

["Terrell Prudé Jr."]

Craig White wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-11-14 at 17:05 -0500, Jim Kronebusch wrote:
>   
>> On Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:37:12 -0500, Todd O'Bryan wrote
>>     
>>> Our district has about 16,000 employees of varying types and is
>>> currently using a web-based Exchange server to do email. The system is
>>> slow, clunky, and the database is getting full, so we've been told to
>>> clean out our mailboxes because they're going to delete all mail older
>>> than 30 days.
>>>
>>> My question is this--does anyone have experience with a system that
>>> will scale reasonably to that many users. If so, we have about 90,000
>>> students. Know of a system that will scale that big? The head IT guy
>>> tells me that he was quoted a commercial cost of between $250k and
>>> $500k for a system that would handle us, and, while that doesn't
>>> surprise me, I think something effective could be done much more
>>> economically.
>>>
>>> I'm just wondering if there's anything I can point to and say, see!
>>>
>>> Todd
>>>       
>> Just one other thought, with a system this big and that many users, don't recommend a
>> home built completely free solution.  Nobody will listen to you, and anything you say
>> will likely be discredited from that point on.  Look for outside vendors that base their
>> products on open source and can provide proven solutions with support.
>>
>> Trust me, I've been down that road with the big boys before :-)
>>     
> ----
> ignoring of course all of the large universities that are running their
> own mail servers.
>
>   

Actually, I have to change my previous input and agree with Jim.  The
reason?  What you just said--"large universities." 

Remember that universities have a decades-long tradition of running
UNIX, way back from the late 1970's.  UNIX (and thus GNU/Linux and BSD)
is well entrenched in the minds of the support teams at universities. 
This is, remember, where they offer Ph. D. Computer Science degrees and
have all sorts of other eggheadiness.

K-12, unfortunately, ain't like that.  Unlike major, prestigious
universities who actually trust their IT departments (e. g. University
of Michigan, University of Washington, MIT, UC Berkeley, and such), K-12
bosses are gonna go for "ooh, pretty package" over actual functionality
any day.  That's why they shouldn't be in charge of IT, but you know
their egos.

Go for "pretty package" based on Free Software and *actual* open standards.

--TP
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