Amidst various universities to ditch in-house mail servers for student and alumni accounts in favor of hosted services offered by Microsoft or Google, Macquarie University has emerged the first of its kind to become one of the first Australian universities to provide Google Gmail accounts to its staff.

The university reveals that a four-stage rollout of 6000 accounts will be initiated between January and September.

Macquarie’s vice-chancellor, Steven Schwarz, said the initial launch proved so successful; there was a compelling argument to move all staff to integrated services.

Macquarie University CIO, Marc Bailey, revealed that it earlier had 40 different email islands across campus, 75 per cent of which were based on Novell GroupWise.

It considered Microsoft’s Live@Edu solution before opting for Google. The reason cited by him is that the former was not a disappointment rather it’s more about moving these services to the cloud.

Since the Gmail accounts are free, Bailey said it would pay $15 per user, per year for support services such as virus and spam protection, as well as archiving and data retrieval, taking the net costs to $90,000.

Also Google’s service is cited to reduce its internal email management costs by 85% and would facilitate its staff with 100 times more email storage.