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Campus Technology ran an article today about the University of Florida’s text messaging system. It costs the university nothing for this outsourced service, which has been used by 10000 students, staff and faculty since 2005.

Users can receive text messages from other members of the service through a group feature. If users join an interest group or a club listed on the service, they’ll receive group messages from the portal. That aspect sounds similar to MySpace and Facebook in some ways. The service keeps track of users phone numbers and manages group preferences. Users must pick up the cost of receiving the text messages through their carriers.

Mobile Campus operates the service generates revenue by sending digital coupons and discounts to the users. UF says that the service users will receive up to two offers per day. Ten other universities in 5 states also offer the service.

UF administrators also use the Mobile Campus system to send out notices about hurricanes and other events that affect the entire campus. This is useful and timely information for commuters, and for university members who are away from their computers. As long as users have a cell phone and are subscribed to the service, they’ll get the message.

Google has been offering universities an academic version of the Gmail service for over a year now. As I mentioned on February 23, this suite of web-based applications includes Google’s word processor, spreadsheet, calendaring and chat programs.

Yesterday, a post in Google’s blog asked university students to send comments about their university’s email systems to Google. The Gmail survey is an interesting way to prospect for sales; ask for leads and examples from disgruntled users of competing systems.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll mention that I’ve been using Gmail for several years now and I love it. The spam filters are constantly updated, and I can check my email on my Sidekick 3. My email is backed up and available when I need it.

Given the state and reputation of HPU’s various mail servers, I’ve often wondered why the unviersity doesn’t use an outsourced service like Gmail, Pau Spam or the implausibly branded Microsoft Windows Live @ Edu Mail (formerly Hotmail). I’ve become so tired of receiving internally generated mail about HPU events that I recently agreed to head a university task force about our email systems.

My main complaint is that there is no easy way for a member of the HPU community to unsubscribe from any or all HPU email lists. Why can’t I go to a single web page and tell HPU that I don’t want email announcements, like users at other universities can?

Instead, I’ve been told to hunt down the sender of each message and tell them to drop me from their list. I’d rather spend my time teaching, writing and consulting.