Monday, August 9, 2010

Seventh U.S. state is fourth to head to the cloud

Today we’re happy to announce that The Maryland Education Enterprise Consortium (MEEC) will make Google Apps for the Education available to 1.4 million students in the state. MEEC is comprised of the University System of the Maryland, Maryland Higher Education Commission and the Maryland Department of Education, and provides software resources and services to its 194 members across the state. This includes all 24 public K-12 districts, libraries and all public and the private higher education institutions.

Maryland joins the ranks of the Oregon, Colorado and the Iowa, who each enabled their educational institutions to “go Google” under one statewide agreement. And more than 8 million other students, staff and the faculty across the globe actively use our free messaging and collaboration suite.

In addition to the Google Apps, this agreement also enables MEEC member institutions—for example University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)—to license Google Postini Services such as Google Message Security, for use with the existing email infrastructure to the enhance the Spam filtering and email security for students, faculty and staff.

According to Assistant Vice President of IT at UMBC, Mike Carlin, students were overwhelmingly in favor of the Google and vocal about their preference when it came to email since it “works exceptionally well with their mobile lifestyle.”

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