6.) .open.ac.uk addresses: Both Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Live@edu will allow the OU to give everyone .open.ac.uk type of addresses, so you can still use your e-mail address for educational discounts.

7.) The Cloud: Your e-mail can be completely hosted in the cloud but it doesn’t have to be. Both systems will allow you to use IMAP or POP capabilities in most e-mail clients to pick up mail, similar to how e-mail likely works from your current Internet Service Provider. You can then organize your e-mail on your own computer however you like, delete it from the remote system, or leave it to be accessed via a web browser.

8.) Advertisements: Google has this to say about ads in Google Apps Education Edition:

There are no advertisements used with the Google Apps Education Edition.

If you have an account for only alumni at your schools, you are required to enable advertisements.

Gmail also offers web clips at the top of your inbox which show you news headlines, blog posts, RSS and Atom feeds, and relevant sponsored links. Each clip displays the source from which it was received, how long ago the clip was published, and a link to access the entire story or page containing the clip. You may want to create custom RSS feeds for your University.

If you have an Education domain and choose to Hide all advertisements for this domain in your domain’s Google Apps control panel, then sponsored links will also no longer be shown as webclips. Your users will still be able to customize their webclips for news headlines, blog posts, RSS feeds, and Atom feeds. ”
— https://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139019

In other words, the university can include its own ads if it wants, but Google itself won’t be adding any (or that’s my reading of the above paragraph).

1) Forums: Forum functionality, if provided, will be part of the Open University’s Moodle system. I don’t know at this point what’s going to happen to the existing OUSA forums. An OUSA representative would be a better person to ask. Google does have “Google Groups”, similar to the idea of Yahoo Groups. This isn’t included in the Google Apps Education Edition specifically, but I’d think any Google account created would be able to access any Google service, including YouTube, Google Groups, Picasa, etc.

2) Keep E-Mail In-House: I realize there’s no option to just keep e-mail in-house or outsource it to a UK-based mail hoster. My understanding is that, for students particularly, it will be migrating to the cloud. It’s only a question of which provider. The two choices are the shortlisted choices the committee is considering. A number of factors were likely considered in shortlisting, including issues about data privacy and transport of data beyond UK/EU borders. In other words, the decision to outsource it has already been made. Many other universities have already done this (which doesn’t make it a good idea, but it’s not unheard of). See, for example, Google’s list of edu customers and some Microsoft Live@edu case studies.

3) Give ALs In-House Address: David Wilson, in the referenced Snowball article, hasn’t discounted this possibility. I don’t have any additional information at this point. I could imagine, however, that migrating everyone to the cloud, especially if it’s “free”, is a tempting choice especially in an environment where education funding cutbacks are rife and we’re in a recession. I don’t know, however, if that’s being considered.

4) No Choice: There’s no choice/way to not answer the question. As it’s fait accomplit, especially for students, that it will be one of the two systems and the factors about acceptable systems are quite complex, I haven’t allowed no choice. That’s also why it’s phrased, “If you had to choose…” You can offer some commentary in the free-text box. I will collate those responses as well.

5) Cross-Platform: Microsoft Live@edu claims to be cross-platform and work with both Safari and Firefox. I have no personal experience with it. I do know that Microsoft HotMail (acquired from Sun Microsystems originally) is web-based and does work fine from Mac browsers. There are, I believe, also ways to use your current e-mail client to pick up e-mail via IMAP/POP from Outlook Live/HotMail. Google Mail and many other Google products are already cross-platform.