At today’s IT Forum, Jim announced that University email will be moving to the cloud and that email and calendaring services will be integrated.
The two service providers under consideration are Google and Microsoft Live. The official word is that more information will be available in 30-45 days. Jeremy and I will work on getting some more information on what vendor has been chosen and when the transition will be so that faculty will have plenty of time to prepare.
There was a lot of other news discussed at the Forum, so I’ll be posting again later this afternoon with more updates and hopefully with a link to the slides.
As usual, let us know your comments and feedback!
This is fantastic news!!! By calendar, do they mean like Oracle, etc. (i.e., our individual work calendars)? Or the university calendar of events? Or both?
And, just to register my “vote” (for what it’s worth), I really hope they go with Google. Though I’m sure they’ve seen this site already, here is Google’s PR site for “businesses that have gone Google”:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/gogoogle.html
Hello All!
About two years ago, the Faculty Senate asked Tim Cannon, Abhit Roy, Declan Mulhall, and I to conduct a survey of the faculty to assess UofS email satisfaction and ask the faculty about their experiences and impressions with other email providers. We received about 65 responses and, not surprisingly, gmail was highly preferred over everything else. But surprisingly, non-gmail email providers (e.g., Comcast, hotmail) were preferred over the UofS email system. (I have a report of the survey somewhere if anyone wants it).
At that time, Dallas Wisehaupt (from IT) got the four of us access to MS Live to explore that system. There was agreement that MS Live was nice and mimicked the current Thunderbird setup , but there was also agreement that navigating through MS Live was quite difficult (but, times may have changed). One issue was setting up contacts, especially group contacts, which is a no-brainier with gmail, but I don’t think we ever figured it out with MS Live. I think that another issue was searching through emails: MS Live did not handle multiple, comma-separated keywords as easily as gmail (but again, times may have changed).
So, I just thought that subscribers to this thread might like to know that a short time ago in a building not to far away, there was faculty assessment of these two systems now under consideration. Our recommendations did get presented to the Faculty Senate and there was general enthusiasm from among the senators to move from the current system to something else. What what something else is…well…time will apparently tell.
Cheers!
Bryan B.
Hi Bryan,
I believe that TAG has asked Tim Cannon for a copy of this report, but if you happen to have it easily accessible somewhere, would you mind posting it for us? Or sending it to me in an e-mail and I can add it the above post. It would just be interesting to see what that recent assessment of the different systems was, as well as what the results you got from your faculty survey were…
Jeremy
[…] anyone who was interested in Bryan’s comment on yesterday’s email update post, here’s a PDF of the Summary Results of the Faculty Senate Email Survey that Bryan and […]
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