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I work in IT at a major Canadian University. I hear what you are saying, but the solutions provided by universities IT departments are usually sub-par to comple

I work in IT at a major Canadian University. I hear what you are saying, but the solutions provided by universities IT departments are usually sub-par to completely not useful. There have been attempts in the past to partner with other schools and develop solutions jointly but are often cost over run disasters. It is really hard to attract any top development talent, or even try and convince current employees to stay up to date with current trends. Lots of development teams are stuck in old waterfall mentalities on huge java stacks. We have laws that protects students data and doesn't allow us to host student or even employee information on U.S. servers. Provincial laws and mandates handed down from deans because of the Homeland Security Act hinder the use of any sort of SaaS's. It makes it really hard and disheartening to provide and develop good solutions. I can't suggest someone go use certain survey tools, or use mailchimp to handle a small campaign for example. I am not supposed to promote the use of Google Drive or Dropbox for day to day use with other staff because of fear they will start storing data they aren't supposed to on it. We often end up with sub-par self hosted copies of great applications, but no one wants to use them. Google classroom looks really cool but there is no way any schools in this province would be allowed to use it.

yeukhon 12y ago
> We have laws that protects students data and doesn't allow us to host student or even employee information on U.S. servers. Provincial laws and mandates handed down from deans because of the Homeland Security Act hinder the use of any sort of SaaS's. Well there is openstack which you can roll your own IaaS after a lot of serious effort. Where I studied in the past would use VMWare heavily to deploy hundreds of OS install. The only reason (people I spoke to since I was sort of involved in that) they couldn't do it was they did not have the incentive to do it. Learning a new technology (rolling OpenStack is not that simple, actually) is very very time-consuming and without the welcome from the top, most people won't even bother to try different technology.
judk 12y ago
Google Classroom runs on a huge Java stack.
ticviking 12y ago
I work at a medium US university and I can say that the thick java stacks and waterfall is a huge part of the sources of headaches in my job. I've got my team quite agile for a Uni development team but we still face lots and lots of problems with FERPA(US student privacy rules), and trying to work with much less agile internal teams. Most of the rest of the local developers are 40-60 and very resistant to any kind of change. (seriously using .net instead of java was hugely controversial)
- shortstuffsushi 12y ago
  Could you or the parent express what you dislike about backends written in Java? I think there tends to be a pretty negative stigma associated with it, but I haven't really seen why. Personally, I've worked with both C# .Net and Java backends, and it's really a horse a piece. Is performance the issue? Security? What is the general dislike of Java about?
  - nacho2sweet 12y ago
    I was just saying it off the cuff as sort of a comment on giant waterfall departments that never create anything great or effective. I don't really have any hate for Java and there is a lot of great software created with it (J2EE was my intro to IS development), just the kind of culture and staff it attracts in this sector. Everyone is in their cubical doing java never innovating anything with no care in the world to ever break out of the status-quo. When they do hire new staff it is usually someone who has been doing that Java at banks or for the government, for 5-8 years and it just continues. Then these people move up into the more senior positions and help cement the culture. Being on more of the web-side it is just frustrating.
    - ticviking 12y ago
      Yeah, you hit the nail on the head with this explanation though.
      - shortstuffsushi 12y ago
mathattack 12y ago
At my undergrad, the internal IT department was generally folks who couldn't get full time jobs in technology. Many departmental projects were done by students as projects, and were never updated or supported afterward.
personjerry 12y ago
Maybe this is asking too much from Google but maybe they could provide some accounts which only back up data to Canadian servers?
dkarapetyan 12y ago
You really don't need a lot of horsepower to set up a reasonable cloud solution. In fact these days it is so simple that you can do it in an afternoon with the help of tools like https://yunohost.org/ https://yunohost.org/.

yeukhon 12y ago

> We have laws that protects students data and doesn't allow us to host student or even employee information on U.S. servers. Provincial laws and mandates handed down from deans because of the Homeland Security Act hinder the use of any sort of SaaS's. Well there is openstack which you can roll your own IaaS after a lot of serious effort. Where I studied in the past would use VMWare heavily to deploy hundreds of OS install. The only reason (people I spoke to since I was sort of involved in that) they couldn't do it was they did not have the incentive to do it. Learning a new technology (rolling OpenStack is not that simple, actually) is very very time-consuming and without the welcome from the top, most people won't even bother to try different technology.

judk 12y ago

Google Classroom runs on a huge Java stack.

ticviking 12y ago

I work at a medium US university and I can say that the thick java stacks and waterfall is a huge part of the sources of headaches in my job. I've got my team quite agile for a Uni development team but we still face lots and lots of problems with FERPA(US student privacy rules), and trying to work with much less agile internal teams. Most of the rest of the local developers are 40-60 and very resistant to any kind of change. (seriously using .net instead of java was hugely controversial)

shortstuffsushi 12y ago
Could you or the parent express what you dislike about backends written in Java? I think there tends to be a pretty negative stigma associated with it, but I haven't really seen why. Personally, I've worked with both C# .Net and Java backends, and it's really a horse a piece. Is performance the issue? Security? What is the general dislike of Java about?
- nacho2sweet 12y ago
  I was just saying it off the cuff as sort of a comment on giant waterfall departments that never create anything great or effective. I don't really have any hate for Java and there is a lot of great software created with it (J2EE was my intro to IS development), just the kind of culture and staff it attracts in this sector. Everyone is in their cubical doing java never innovating anything with no care in the world to ever break out of the status-quo. When they do hire new staff it is usually someone who has been doing that Java at banks or for the government, for 5-8 years and it just continues. Then these people move up into the more senior positions and help cement the culture. Being on more of the web-side it is just frustrating.
  - ticviking 12y ago
    Yeah, you hit the nail on the head with this explanation though.
    - shortstuffsushi 12y ago

mathattack 12y ago

At my undergrad, the internal IT department was generally folks who couldn't get full time jobs in technology. Many departmental projects were done by students as projects, and were never updated or supported afterward.

personjerry 12y ago

Maybe this is asking too much from Google but maybe they could provide some accounts which only back up data to Canadian servers?

dkarapetyan 12y ago

You really don't need a lot of horsepower to set up a reasonable cloud solution. In fact these days it is so simple that you can do it in an afternoon with the help of tools like https://yunohost.org/ https://yunohost.org/.