These types of emails would include account setups, password resets, etc. Since we host our WordPress installation off-campus, somewhere in the tubes between there and our mail system here the mails were being eaten, quite possibly by a large, scary email-eating koala bear. In reality, it was probably an overzealous filter somewhere on our campus end that couldn’t guarantee that emails coming from our Rackspace box to campus really were legit and really were from a University account.

This made creating user accounts very labor intensive. Instead of just emailing login details, password reset requests and more directly to the user, we found ourselves creating an account for a person and immediately resetting their password, and then giving them the login details. Same went for password changes, they were never getting the transactional email to reset their passwords, so they were calling us. Not efficient.

Enter SendGrid. They are one of a few providers of email service, but unlike MailChimp or Constant Contact, they aren’t about the marketing and list management end of emails. They are about providing a delivery gateway to ensure that emails reach their intended destinations with a high degree of reliability.

After setting up an account at SendGrid (look for the free plan at the bottom of this page to try it out. You get 200 emails per day and we’ve never come close to reaching that), SendGrid’s documentation directed us to a page about integrating SendGrid with WordPress.

Using the WP Mail SMTP plugin, we are able to now avoid using the default wp_mail() and PHP mail commands from our server and instead we have our transactional email sent via SendGrid. To keep the admin panel from showing up and potentially confusing users, even admin users, the plugin allows you to put some details in your wp-config.php file. That code looks like this:

define('WPMS_ON', true);
define('WPMS_MAIL_FROM', 'webmaster@gallifrey.edu');
define('WPMS_MAIL_FROM_NAME', 'Gallifrey University CMS');
define('WPMS_MAILER', 'smtp');
define('WPMS_SET_RETURN_PATH', 'false');
define('WPMS_SMTP_HOST', 'smtp.sendgrid.net');
define('WPMS_SMTP_PORT', 587); //
define('WPMS_SSL', '');
define('WPMS_SMTP_AUTH', true);
define('WPMS_SMTP_USER', 'YOURACCOUNTNAME');
define('WPMS_SMTP_PASS', 'YourAccountPasword');

And what do you know, they’re getting through. Our support calls and requests have dropped, and we can focus more of our limited resources on developing great sites and content with our campus partners. Win-win for everyone.

SendGrid isn’t just for these types of emails – it does much more as you can see in this video:

As you dig more into their system, you’ll see they offer email handling, reports and all sorts of other analytics – they don’t just handle transactional email.

So, SendGrid is and will be a part of any web projects for us (and me outside of John Carroll) going forward. It’s just one more thing I won’t have to worry about.

And that, my friends, is a good thing.

Wufoo is very full featured, with a robust API, a myriad of reporting options an several embedding options. We’ve been using it quite a bit as part of recruitment communications to customize and personalize forms as well as emails back to a user when they complete a form, which is really handy.

When we’ve had a support question or issue, it’s been answered and addressed quickly, which is nice.

So I’m 100% down with Wufoo, but I find myself wanting a few things that would take it to the next level.

1. Let me bring my own storage

At the level we’re at (the carpe diem plan at $69 a month), giving us only 3GB of storage is pretty silly. That amount of storage costs less than a dollar at any of the cloud storage services. Please, Wufoo, let me connect easily with my Amazon S3 account, where I could store as many files as possible and worry about the cost myself. I can think of a few forms where we’re asking people to upload a hi-res photo, and if a few hundred people fill out that form at a time, we could potentially get close to the limit. This should be a trivial fix.

2. Pagination

For surveys and other longer forms, it’d be really swell to break a form up across several pages. We have some applications and surveys that are so long I fear users see how long they have to scroll until they reach the end and they give up and go away. But a break in there would be nice.

3. Conditional Questions

The ability to ask a follow-up question only if a user selected a certain option in a checkbox or radio field would be nice. We’re getting this question quite a bit from people on campus.

4. A level between “Carpe Diem” and “Ad Infinitum”

It feels like there really should be one more level between their Carpe Diem plan (20 users, 3GB, 15,000 entries a month, $69.95/mo) and their Ad Infinitium plan (60 users, 10GB, 100,000 entries, $199.95/mo). We need about 40 users to cover everyone across campus. It’d be nice if there was a $99 or $129 plan where I could get 40 users, 6GB and 50,000 entries.

Wufoo, keep on keeping on. We’re huge fans of your service and so are our campus users.

Update from Wufoo::

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?