It reminds me far too much of Eircom and their self-congratulations over the years - “we rank 1st in the world for broadband availability (*cough* only including countries which have prime ministers called Bertie)”.

Incidentally, the ‘freebie beta test’ is the same as the Education Edition of Google Apps - 2gb accounts and its all free. Perhaps I’m just not a fan of PR news-bytes calling a hand trowel a spade.

The fact it claims is “Trinity College Dublin (TCD) has become the first _university_ in Europe….”. GCD having it earlier doesn’t contradict that at all.

Google’s PR people are looking for a nice sound-byte and a partnership with the most prestigious university in Ireland makes a rather better one than a freebie beta test with a small private college almost nobody’s heard of.

You’d have to remind the provost of TCD who or what GCD is before he could muse about anything.

Hosted mail - bfd only coz it’s google. I suppose it saves on bandwidth for bebo.

Saw the post about Google’s hosted mail. Don’t know if you’d be interested in the more geeky aspects of hosted vs. in-house messaging, but I’m an editor working on behalf of Microsoft to manage the development of a commissioned whitepaper about hosted messaging entitled “The Advantages of a Hosted Messaging Security Solution” by Osterman Research.

The whitepaper has been posted online as a wiki ( http://www.mehsreport.com/ - Head over there and you’ll see my photo. ) and it argues that paying a hosting company to manage your messaging costs less or the same as if you were to build and manage your own messaging system.

The whitepaper is highly opinionated and bases its pro-hosting argument on its belief that the last year has been a critical year for messaging and that it’s only going to get worse from here on in.

You can check out the discussion section of the Executive Summary of the wiki to see where else people are discussing this topic (http://www.mehsreport.com/wiki/Talk:Executive_Summary).

If you’re interested, please throw in your two cents in the discussion.

David

I would have mixed feelings about letting Google into an organisation but a college wouldn’t have as much need (I think?) for confidentiality. Not that I don’t trust Google, I just don’t trust Google :). They really are going to have their hands in everything on the web in the future, or at least buy it up!