Seats are still available for NERCOMP's upcoming workshop: "Google Apps for Education--Cloudy or Partly Cloudy?"

DATE: January 23, 2009

TIME: 9:00- 3:00 (Coffee and Registration start at 8:00)

PRICE: NERCOMP Members: $127, Non-Members: $252

LOCATION: Southbridge Hotel & Conference Center, Southbridge, MA.

DESCRIPTION: It is not easy to escape the “Cloud” these days. Equally omnipresent in our minds is the issues surrounding E-mail. Yes, most of us seem to have figured out various ways to deliver email that has been cleansed of SPAM, phishing and malware content, but we still process over 90% junk that clogs our resources. Google Apps for Education (GAE) is a timely topic that addresses both of these issues. GAE is a free offering from Google that allows educational institutions to migrate their email and calendaring activity to a branded site and offers the added benefit of document based collaboration using Google Docs. Many large and small institutions have already migrated to GAE after some initial reluctance to do this based primarily on privacy concerns.

In this SIG, you will hear from two institutions that have taken very different approaches to migrating to GAE. Speakers from the Rhode Island School of Design, which chose to migrate only their students to GAE and Oberlin College which completed the migration of all of their emails to GAE will provide all the details from start to finish during this exciting SIG. They will tell us the juicy details of what transpired the move to Google, about the campus discussions on the merits of such a move and finally the nitty gritty details of the whole migration process.

An important aspect of moving a core service such as E-mail to the Cloud requires a thorough understanding of the legal implications, especially in the wake of some of the new federal regulations on E-Discovery and FERPA. We have invited the General Counsels from Wesleyan University and the Rhode Island School of Design to help clarify the “Cloudy” aspects of legalities surrounding such a move.

For a full schedule and registration information, please go to:
http://www.nercomp.org/events/event_single.aspx?id=1749