By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: What about higher education–specific vendors? RS: I would put Apple in there. Apple would count as an education-specific vendor. SM: How so? Do they have specific offerings for higher education? RS: Every other year, Apple organizes a conference for CIOs in higher education. They have account
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: I think when you talk in terms of e-mail or CRM, the basic e-mail or CRM, these are horizontal functionalities. You would definitely have an advantage if you use somebody else’s solution that has been built, tested, and scaled, and something that is scalable on this
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: There are applications on Salesforce that are specific to fundraising; have you looked at those in this process? RS: Well, I wanted a solution that was specific to higher education, non-profit fundraising versus just non-profit fundraising and other areas. I also wanted this solution to be
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: In addition to e-mail, what other workloads at Westmont College have you moved to the cloud? RS: We followed that with other projects based on community input here at Westmont. Another thing we really wanted to get right was wireless. When I arrived, the existing wireless
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: What e-mail system did Westmont College use before IT started exploring cloud-based solutions? RS: We were using Postfix. It is an open source–based product, but our e-mail scale had grown so dramatically over the years and the storage behind it was getting problematic.
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini In the multibillion-dollar market of higher education in the United States, we see an interesting trend whereby a combination of IT people and college communities are playing the role of an active “lead user” and using the cloud computing paradigm to make campus life simpler and information