Faculty and staff, including those who also hold student status, will remain on the existing e-mail system but will notice a significant improvement in functionality once the student transition is complete.
“We appreciate everyone’s patience as we prepare to transition student accounts to the Gmail system,” said Terrie Rowe, OU’s Chief Information Officer. “The IT staff shares the campus’ frustrations as we have outgrown the existing system. We have been working hard to implement the most efficient and attractive solution for Oakland, so we are looking forward to the change.”
University Technology Services (UTS) considered several e-mail solutions, but the Google system proved to be the most suited for Oakland University.
“There is no cost associated with Google e-mail, for the university or the students. It would have cost us millions of dollars to equip our existing e-mail system in terms of infrastructure and maintenance to handle the volume of e-mail we are now seeing come through,” Rowe said.
Each student account on the new Gmail system will have more than 6 GB of storage space. The Gmail system also offers improved spam prevention. Spam solutions for faculty and staff on the existing e-mail system are in the works.
The login page for OU Webmail will not change for students, faculty and staff.
“Faculty and staff will automatically be pointed to the existing system upon login, while students will be pointed to their Gmail account as soon as the switch is flipped,” said Rowe. “Students will then have the option of importing their mail and contacts from the existing e-mail system to the Gmail system.”
Shortly after the close of the winter 2008 semester, student e-mails and contacts residing on the existing e-mail server will be permanently deleted. Because e-mail is not backed up for security reasons, messages that are not imported into Gmail will be irrecoverable.
The date of the transition will be determined in the coming weeks and announced on The News at OU.