Help Me, Feedburner, You’re My Only Hope

One of the first blog posts I wrote here was about how much I love Feedburner. Feedburner is so good at handling all the RSS feeds at my college, and I don’t have to worry about it.

One of Feedburner’s best features is it’s email subscriptions services. It handles user subscriptions, unsubscribe requests and lets you customize the look of the emails that get sent out. Basically, it’s the perfect RSS to Email platform. Set it and forget it. Each day, it dutifully sends out an email with my RSS headlines to on and off-campus users. It’s so great I want to use it send our intranet headlines to everyone on my campus. I’ve got the OK from administration and I want to get this project done.

So I started researching if Feedburner would let me import email addresses for my campus users. For a bit of time, Feedburner would allow you send a file to them and they would import email addresses for you. It’s a bit more work then just letting people do it themselves, but I can imagine that would lead to a spam avalanche for Feedburner. So, they stopped accepting email list imports.

During that time, they got acquired by Google. I’m sure they enjoyed a nice payday and the reliability of Google’s architecture, but the downside is that innovation and development on new features has pretty much dried up, similar to Google’s many other acquisitions (Grand Central, DodgeBall, Jaiku, etc.) The email list import is the biggest request by users on the support forums, and the answer seems to vary between “soon” to “sometime this month” to “never.”

I want to use Feedburner to send my emails. I’ve tried other services like Feedblitz and the emails lack the elegance of Feedburner. No offense, FeedBlitz, but setting up an account in your system was a hassle and the customization options were confusing. Feedburner is 10x more simple. Look at these emails and tell me which one looks more elegant and easier to read and understand.

Feedburner:

An email from Feedburner.

FeedBlitz:

An email from Feedblitz

Help me, Feedburner. Please, I beg you, let me import my users into your system. I will pay you for this functionality. I don’t have the time to spend trying to figure out how to make FeedBlitz look presentable. If anyone at Feedburner reads this, please email me.

Does anyone else out there have suggestions of services to check out, seeing as how FB will probably not get back to me? Thank you in advance.

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August 25, 2008 | Filed Under Feedburner, Google, RSS, Web App | 2 Comments

A quick thought or two about email outsourcing

I enjoyed Karine’s article in University Business magazine about schools that are outsourcing email services to Microsoft and Google. I’d love for my institution to outsource our email to Gmail. From a systems management and infrastructure standpoint, it would really free up not only server time and bandwidth, but also staff time in having to maintain, keep up and grow email solutions.

After reading the article, I have a few thoughts to throw out there about outsourced email.

At my institution, we have a terrible webmail solution at the moment and I think these outsourced solutions offer a much more usable interface and feature set then many web mail solutions, including some open-source products.

Secondly, since you can connect to Gmail through POP or IMAP, conceivably the switch to an outsourced provider would be transparent for many of your on-campus users, such as faculty, staff and administration. They could continue to use the email client of their choice and access Gmail and it’s storage space and spam filtering. They could continue on business as usual and not have to learn an entire new interface if they didn’t want to.

Third: one other thing to think about outsourcing email is the mobile strategy part. Yes, Gmail can be accessed by web browser, POP and IMAP but Gmail also has specialized clients and access for Blackberrys, Palms, and iPhones. This would mean that IT departments wouldn’t have to run BES or some other setup if they didn’t want to, and connecting the phones to the user’s existing Gmail account would be much easier then it sometimes currently is. I can imagine this would be of great relief to IT staff in many schools.

In the article, Karine mentions that schools will have to think about the bandwidth usage. She says:

Moving thousands of e-mail accounts from a local network to the internet will also have some impact on bandwidth usage–especially if students start to use heavily the other collaboration features also offered for documents, photos, events, and more. The resulting higher demand might not be a showstopper, depending on the institution, but it will definitely need to be factored into the equation.

Actually, it might be a wash in the end. Why? The answer could be spam.

Barracuda Networks released a report at the end of last year that said 95% of all email sent in 2007 was spam. That unending barrage of bits eats up a large part of the bandwidth at any company or IHE (not to mention processing cycles), and by moving that to someone else’s pipe, the load may be reduced to the point that it might not have as strong an impact as expected.

I think this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to colleges outsourcing services. I was talking with Karine and Mark Greenfield at EduWeb about this and Mark mentioned that the university datacenter in 20 years may be very different but I think you’ll see major changes in just five years, especially as cloud technologies mature. Today it’s email and web sites, but soon it will be backups, your CRM solution, ERP, BI and a bunch of other services.

Could the university data center of the future look like this?

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August 7, 2008 | Filed Under Cloud, Google, Outsourcing | 2 Comments

Head in the Cloud Slides

We just wrapped up our EduWeb presentation on using the cloud in higher education, and at least from my perspective at the front of the room (and some on the sides and back of the room), things went well and hopefully people learned some new things.