Calendars and Email

Yesterday Cindy and I attended a UITS (campus computing) presentation on the future of email and calendars at UA and the Google Enterprise Applications for Education. Last week we attended a similar session on Microsoft Outlook/Exchange.

Here is the “bottom line” for AHSL first, followed by the details for those who are interested. We started a move toward the Outlook calendar before the campus began looking at Google Calendar/Gmail and before our change in reporting. At the time, a move toward Outlook made sense since the College of Medicine (COM) was using it and it provided more features than Meeting Maker – a system that the campus was moving away from. Since we are well down that road, we will continue. ITS (COM computing) will soon be connecting all of our Outlook calendars to the server to allow us to view each other’s calendars. If the university decides to move away from Outlook we will have to re-evaluate what makes sense for us. We can do what the rest of the university is doing or continue to use the COM system.

Now the details. The campus is going to move away from its existing email system and from Meeting Maker. There are two choices: Microsoft Outlook and Google Enterprise Applications for Education. The Microsoft choice will cost about $1,500,000; Google is free (although UA will purchase some additional archiving space for about $150,000). The current plan is to explore if there are any compelling reasons not to go with Google. All of the basic features of email and calendars are pretty much the same with both systems. Microsoft offers some nice bells and whistles, but they don’t seem to be anything that would get much use. Google email offers 7.6 gigabytes of storage to each user compared with Microsoft’s 500 MB.

The campus arrangement with Google would create a UA “space” on Google that would provide security and would not include the advertising that often accompanies Google’s open Gmail and calendar.

On July 10, all UA students will move to Gmail and will have access to Google calendar, Google documents and a variety of other Google applications. The students will be in the UA “space” at Google. Their email addresses will remain “X@email.arizona.edu”.

The campus is pilot testing Google with 200 faculty and staff and they are looking for 200 more. If you would like to test the Google products you can write to: googlepilot@listserv.arizona.edu You will keep your existing email account. If the campus goes with Google your pilot account will be rolled over into the new system. If the campus doesn’t, your calendar will disappear and you can continue to use your UA mail. More information about the pilot and the whole Google offer is available at: googlepilot.arizona.edu