Assignment 4 - Acceptable Use Policy

I work for an online learning company. Our shared drive is essential since our offices are located all over the US and many of us work from home offices. Our shared drive is where we store all of our forms, spreadsheets and databases. This allows all of those who need to, to be able to access those items at any time. If we have documents that we do not want others to edit, we password protect them.To get to the shared drive remotely we need to go through a VPN (Virtual Private Network) set up by our IT people. This makes sure that no one outside our organization can access these files.
I am familiar with acceptable use policies. i have agreed to several over the past few years, some very vague and others very specific. I think somewhere in the middle is best; too vague and the school or company is vulnerable. However, there is no way to cover every possibility when technology is constantly in flux. The company I work for does not have an AUP, that I am aware of, for its employees. Our customers are schools and school districts that contract us to teach courses to their students online. Each school or district has their own AUP and we require that all students be informed of this before they are enrolled in an online class. We do this because we want our customers to feel that their rules and regulations will be respected and we tailor our services to their district's needs.
My company uses Microsoft Outlook but in several different ways. Those employees who are located in a corporate office use Outlook. Employees who telecommute (work from their home offices) access MS Outlook through the VPN. These employees are also supplied with a Blackberry or similar device to access their email account. Teachers access their email through Outlook Web Access; this is a trimmed down version of Outlook and it has a lot of issues. The biggest problem is that it times out. Teachers will be in the middle of typing a message and then it times out and they have to sign in again. most times their message is lost and they have to start over. Another big issue is that there is no archiving capability with O.W.A. Teachers' mailboxes fill up quickly and they have to delete old messages or their mailbox becomes full and they can no longer receive or send messages until they clean it out.
Students use their personal emails or an email account set up for them by their sending school. Some schools/school districts do not allow their students to use email because of liability issues and filters. These students use the message center within the Blackboard learning management system to communicate with their teachers. This is a poor tool because the student and the teacher must go into the message center to send and retrieve messages and they can be viewed by all class participants.
The most important part of the lesson this week for me was the email account information. As I have described in the above paragraphs our current email system is not running efficiently for our purposes. I and my colleagues have been asked to evaluate it and research and recommend alternatives. This week's lesson gave me some insight as to what we need and what might be available.