In the thirteen months since, we've been market testing Cisco Mail via a controlled release. The product has been well received, but we've since learned that customers have come to view their email as a mature and commoditized tool versus a long-term differentiated element of their collaboration strategy. We've also heard that customers are eager to embrace emerging collaboration tools such as social software and video.

In other words, "we couldn't compete with Google"?

Its Web site, UniLeaks, debuted this month with a pair of open letters to university leaders in Australia and Britain. The Australian activists who run UniLeaks are pushing for openness in the face of what they see as the corporatization of higher education. They complain of unprofitable courses abolished, employees made less secure, and students reduced “to mere customers or clients of the university.”

UniLeaks has yet to back that bluster with any blockbuster scoops. But the site’s main administrator says it has received an “overwhelming” amount of correspondence from Britain-based students and academics. That support includes at least one potentially newsworthy data dump: an “entire e-mail repository” of a “large prominent university in the United Kingdom,” a database that seems to be limited to senior management at the institution.

I wonder if this will give added incentive to universities that are considering outsourcing mail to Google (where it can be looked after securely! ;-) )?