On 04/09/14 18:05, Dave Clements wrote:
On 4 Sep 2014, at 17:31, David Colling wrote:
Hi Dave,
1. It is, frankly, a marketing move by Microsoft so that our students will end up paying their Office 365 subscriptions once they leave Imperial, on pain of having their cloud-stored files deleted if they don't keep up the payments. Our students should have this option if they want, but it should be through their own choice. We should not by default put them into bondage with Microsoft or any other company at square one.
We are only offering them something for free that they would otherwise not have.
We are also removing the support that they get from ICT that they would otherwise have had. I feel strongly that this is dodging our responsibility.
We are not removing any support from ICT other than gradually running fewer exchange servers.
A 1Tb drive costs about 80 quid at the moment. Given that these students are paying 9K a year I fail to see that it would be impossible to provide them with this service locally.
You know that having a fully backed up system etc costs far more than the cost of the disks
I have my own 3Tb (and expandable) cloud & email server at home. Are we really saying that ICT is so incapable of providing such services that we have to become dependent on MS?
It is up to ICT to provide a service in a cost effective way. This is what they are doing. So is this the location of your sex tapes? Beware of hackers ;-)
3. As we have just seen with sex tapes on iCloud, off-site storage of data can get very difficult. If we are contracting out students' file storage to someone else then there are considerable hazards.
I would strongly suggest that you do NOT put your sex tapes on the Office365 cloud. Incentives for hackers as they may be...
a) Students will
That is up to them. They can put them on dropbox or icloud just as easily.
b) It's not just sex tapes you have to worry about. Lab reports, essays, assessed problem sheets... What if they start leaking? And that's before we get to the sensitive stuff that staff have to look after.
You can find these all over the internet anyway ... just try a github search for Imperial College Computational physics projects - not pleasant reading.
What is Office365 has a glitch just before a coursework deadline? MS won't care any more about this than any other customer, but our own support people would be able to deal with this as a matter of urgency. Since late reports now get zero marks there are some serious potential problems here.
In the email below it is suggested that students keep work to be handed in on their H: drive as they do now. If there is a significant glitch we would have to be reasonable as we are now if there is a problem.
a) They won't
Then tough.
b) A report is a final product. Large data files will end up on the MS cloud that would once have been stored by us, and will be subject to the same problems.
Well, I suspect that any glitches will be short in comparison to the length of a project. Surprisingly perhaps it is not completely unheard of for ICT to have a glitch on their disk servers - even the geniuses who run the HEP computing have had the (very very) occasional glitch from time to time.
At the moment it might be in the EU but (a) what guarantee is there that it will stay there and (b) we might be a target but we're not as big or juicy a target as Microsoft.
I expect that this is part of the contract (it has been with all others of this nature that I have known but I don't know about this one). Adrian, any comment? We are less of a target than MS but they send a lot more on security than we do.
2. Some of us do not use operating systems on the list supported. Most postdocs in astro, for example, use linux machines which, it would appear, will not be supported.
I too use Linux. Having asked Adrian about this there appears to be a secure imap interface to the email (and I found the following article http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2012/03/28/is-office-365-the-best-thing-thats-e... ). As far as I can tell (from web searching and from what Adrian tells me) there is only access to the cloud storage through the browser - rather like sharepoint.
Sharepoint is crap to the point of unusable from the machines I've worked on. Dropbox is a better option!
Another cloud based solution. It is just the interface that is different.
I would also like to ask a couple of other questions about this change:
- how much of this is motivated by doing something 'good' for the students and how much is this a question of outsourcing support that College doesn't want to pay for?
I would imagine both. I know that ICT are very keen to provide the best environment for our students and are pretty pro-active. If this gives the students a better system than they have now and saves us money then what is not to like?
I remain to be convinced that either will be the case in the long term.
One of the things that the students said that they really wanted was access to a facility like dropbox. I have been in meetings with ICT where this has been discussed and this is the solution that ICT came up with.
- what is DoC doing? As the local experts in these matters it seems to me that they often make better decisions than ICT
All DoC students will be moved across. I believe that there are only two "independent" mail servers in college. One in HEP and one in DoC and the one in DoC is being gradually faded away.
That will be a sad day and will be a major backward step in flexibility. I still rue the day that astro lost its email server.
So why did you?
More generally, I am aware that the legal status of cloud computing is still rather uncertain. If, for example, a student loses their thesis project files because of a fault in the cloud who is to blame and who gets sued? Most cloud services are offered with few service level guarantees. Is this really what we want to offer our students?
I guess that college get sued as it would do now. However, I know that I was writing my thesis it was backed up nightly at CERN and at home so there were always 3 copies. I would still say that is wise behaviour. Perhpas Adrian can comment about the SLA. This is a commercial arrangement that we are entering into so there will be an SLA that is more comprehensive than those with individual users.
I have asked a friend (and IC alumnus) who has written one of the few legal papers on cloud computing about this. My suspicion is that while there may be an SLA, when push comes to shove it may be as empty as the evaporated data, but I will get back to you on this.
This is outside my field of expertise. I still remember the pain of going through the lawyers letters concerning our use of Mathematica ... the pain...
And there is the usual warning about most such services - if you are not paying for the product then you *are* the product. As a matter of principle we should not be making our students the product in this or any other case.
I don't get this last part. We are paying for it.
So we get to pay to sell our students into dependency? No wonder MS is keen.
We pay for mathematica, matlab, MS office, visual studio, origin etc etc etc while they are here all of which they loose when they leave. How is this any different?
How does this work for Linux anyway?
When MS releases its cloud code as open source then this comparison can be made. Until then it's not a valid.
Linux is free and yet I don't feel that I am a product as I type this (may be I am just too close to see it).
All in all this proposed change is effectively contracting out our duty of care for our students digital lives to an external corporation which has at best a chequered history. I do not think that is in their best interests no matter what short term financial or perceived 'experiential' benefits there might be for the College.
If you invite guests around for a dinner party it is your duty to provide them with a good meal, it is not your duty to cook. ICT have just bought in the caterers. QMUL (and I think UCL) have done similar things with their email. Best, david
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David Colling