Cloud Solution – Alumni E-Mail for Life

Students, past and present, are what a university is all about. The reputation of a university is gauged by the success of its students in practical life after they embark on their various careers. If a university produces successful graduates who are intelligent, innovative and effective in their fields then its reputation will grow. New graduates will have better job prospects and the success will continue. It is therefore very important for a university to keep track of its alumni. Alumni can also help their universities not only with donations but also with advice and support for new graduates.

This is why alumni email for life is an important offering for many universities. Universities often utilise their existing IT infrastructure to provide this facility. This is, however, a grey area in legal terms. Because the university uses the IT resources, the DFN network that is financed from funds for research and teaching and is not intended for commercial purposes.

The University of Bremerhaven with the help of Axtrion has realized its alumni email system based on open source products UCS (univention corporate server) and OX (open exchange). The system is hosted in one of the most modern cloud-based data centers. The approach is absolutely scalable so that the growth of hundreds of alumni each year will be easily tackled by the system as the underlying architecture scales depending on demand.

In addition to the economical view, the solution is interesting for the University of Bremerhaven because of its ecological aspects. The CO2 footprint of a scalable cloud based system is light and sustainable.