Email is a solved problem, and it's mysterious to me why a school system wouldn't just throw up a few servers and be done with it. Google can now data mine millions of students for marketing purposes, and charge them for the benefit. I don't get it.
And the AU was probably smart enough to do the research and find out that it would cost a whole lot more to purchase, build out, and maintain their own mail infrastructure.
Maybe
I've spent enough time in the hands of the NSW Department of Education to be able to tell you that any time they make the correct decision it's purely by accident.
- Gmail is $9.5 million and should be live by the end of 2008
- User storage will increase from 35 MB to 1 GB
From what I understand, looking for 1st rate sys admins is like looking for rockstar janitors.
Now, sysadmin may be a bit of a misnomer - sometimes sysadmins are given fancy titles such as 'network engineer', 'network architect', 'IT Manager', etc. They're all basically sysadmins.
Good sysadmins do more than just image laptops. They are familiar with the software's architecture, so they can help scale it up to whatever proportions are needed. They almost certaintly are proficient perl/bash/python programmers as well.
Many of them are little more than low-skilled button pressers, password resetters, and service restarters (although they may have lots of domain-specific knowledge learned by rote and not understood).
The good ones, however, are more than competent programmers in their own right, can make quick and accurate diagnoses of tough problems and fix them, write their own tools, etc.