I've recently been involved, along with colleagues from JISC and UCISA, in pulling together some guidance for those universities and colleges who are considering outsourcing their student email services to a 3rd party.
One of the most interesting discoveries when working on this was the number of institutions who are either actively considering or actually already going down this path. This is no theoretical 'what if' scenario any more.
Interestingly all institutions have so far limited the scope of their outsourcing to student email services only as these seem to throw up less management issues than working with staff email and related information systems. But if these early projects are successful I wonder how soon it will be before someone decides to extend the reach of their outsourcing solutions to incorporate institutional information and data regardless of these complications.
