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. If they get used to it then they will have to pay once they leave (or move to some other provider where they will also have to pay) but I do not see this a reason not to give them access while they are here. We could never (well not for a great number of years) offer them 50GB of in box and 1TB of personal backed up space. So just because the poor little might have to pay for what we give them once they leave is not a reason not to give it to them while they are here. The same is true of things like journal access and many other things.

2. What is to become of imperial.ac.uk? I just noticed a graduate of CalTech, from more than 30 years ago, still using a caltechalumni email address. This is great advertising for CalTech. We already lose our relationship with students when they leave. If we're to lose them to gmail at square one then the College's noticeability is going to much reduced.

I think that this is a very valid point generally and is may be something we should take up with Mike Russell and the college alumni people. I know that places like LBS give thei alumni an email for life as well as other privileges such as being able to book rooms at a discount. Things like this would greatly help our connections to our alumni.

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...

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.

From the point of view of staff:

1. We have to keep personal data and emails from our students, sometimes of a very sensitive nature. If this is on College servers we know where it is and we know that we are not breaching EU data laws. As David indicates, there are already issues with court orders in Ireland, but things could get worse very quickly. For example, Imperial is not a major target for hackers seeking personal data. Microsoft is.

I believe that our data is likely to be in the EU (Dublin or Amsterdam according to Adrian). So the same law applies. Imperial is a target for hackers, and I am sure that Microsoft put, pro rata, as much into security as Imperial does. They have a significant reputation issue.

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.

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 say this as somebody who still runs his own web and email servers (and as of a few days ago a minecraft server so that my son's friends can all play together on it from their different homes).

- 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.

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.

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. How does this work for Linux anyway? Best, david