EightBlack.

This is the start of something to be sure. News today in The Australian that Gmail has just won the tender to supply the entire NSW Department of Education with 1.5 million student email accounts.

Apparently, its one of the single largest Gmail deployments ever, and the work is being done by local integrator, SMS.

Email storage increases 170 fold (from 35MB to over 6 Gigabytes). Which is enough for even the most perverted of students.

What is silly though is that students wont be given access to the chat function (GTalk) and teachers wont be ported to Gmail because some IT drone was worried about bandwith costs between the US and Australia.

If they were worried about, why not ask Google to pony up for the money. You can be sure they’d listen, especially if it meant ousting Microsoft from every other state based education department.

The deal is going to save the NSW Government around $24 million.

According to TechCrunch;

The cost savings are substantial. The Outlook/Exchange platform involved a AU$33 million contract and took four years to go live, although it’s unclear why it took so long. The Gmail/Google Apps rollout, which is being completed by subcontractors, will cost just $9.5 million and should be live by the end of 2008.

It will be interesting to see how the students react to contextual based advertising within email, how many continue to use their Hotmail or Yahoo accounts or simply how many kids just don’t give a stuff.

I’m convinced Google will be very keen on the data that they will be able to pull from the deployment.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Email Marketing, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.