Creighton’s Division of Information Technology has been investigating the possibility of transitioning student, faculty, staff, research and alumni e-mail accounts to Gmail – Google’s e-mail platform.
DoIT’s Gmail initiative, which was launched in mid-2008, is still in the planning process, Project Manager Dana Olson said, but they hope to have a decision whether to pursue the transition by the end of February.
To help with the decision, DoIT hosted Town Hall meetings during January to find out what the Creighton community needs in an e-mail host.
Olson said some benefits Google offers are 6 GB inboxes, a chat tool, Google Docs – which fosters collaboration and file-sharing capabilities – and an opportunity for the university to save money.
“We were looking at it for students, and we decided, with the economic conditions, to see if it would be a good fit for the rest of the university,” Olson said. “We need to understand what they use in our current environment today to make sure it’s still available in the Google environment so we can go back and do the appropriate research.”
Google is partnering with universities to offer “free e-mail” for students, faculty and staff. St. Louis University and the University of Southern California have successfully made the switch.
Although Google calls it “free e-mail,” Olson said this is misleading because costs would still be involved if the university transitioned to the Google environment.
“With the data being hosted offsite at Google’s data center, there are some things we need to do to our infrastructure to make sure that e-mail is still secure,” Olson said. “Those will have costs.
“We’re trying to identify all those costs and balance that with what would be the cost if we kept Exchange [Creighton’s current e-mail environment].”
Another possible benefit of switching to Gmail is the ability for alumni to keep a creighton.edu e-mail account. Right now, alumni only have Creighton e-mails for a year after graduation.
With the Gmail system, the domain would change to alumni or alum.creighton.edu, but alumni would still have a Creighton account.
“If they’re cut off they’ve had to change their address anyway. I personally think putting alumni or alum.creighton would be a positive thing,” Michael LaCroix said at a Town Hall meeting.
Other issues being addressed include problems with mobile connectivity and FERPA compliance for Gmail’s global address book.
“The global address book Google offers – it’s on or it’s off. However, when you turn it on it’s not FERPA compliant right now. It does not give the students the ability to opt out of the directory, so if we were to roll out Google tomorrow, we would have to turn ours off,” Olson said.
“Google knows this, they are working on it, and I think in the second quarter of this year it’s supposed to be fixed.”
At the Town Hall meetings, people were able to ask questions and voice their concerns about transitioning to Gmail. Olson said the meetings have been well-received.
“Everybody’s been talking. The sharing of calendars seems to be very important, and the ability to schedule meetings,” Olson said. “A lot of staff members have found that very beneficial and want to keep it, but others will say, ‘Really? I don’t use that.’ It’s very diverse.”