Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

Many of you may have read the news item in Friday, Nov 14 issue of Argus titled “ITS hopes to connect WebMail to GMail” . It is well written. However, it says “ITS is also consulting other schools that have already made the switch to G-Mail, such as Northwestern University and Trinity College, about technology and privacy issues.” As far as I am aware, Trinity College has not moved to Google. I will check and report back. Some of the other colleges that we will be contacting that have already made the switch are Colgate, RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), Oberlin and Macalester.

Our techincal staff met last week to discuss the nitty gritty details of how to make all of this come together and based on the report I received from Karen Warren, Director of User and Technical Services, who is leading this team, things are looking good. We have set up a blog which we will use to inform everyone of the progress as well as prepare detailed documentation relating to the transition. When it becomes ready, we will announce the URL.

We are also working with our General Counsel David Winakor, reviewing the contract from Google. When I was at EDUCAUSE in late October, many of the schools that have converted to Google Apps for Education informed the rest of us that Google is amenable to revising the contract based on the Higher ED needs. David also consulted lawyers from a couple of other schools to confirm this. He has marked up the contract from Google and we have sent it back to them for their review.

Thanks to Greg Marsh, class of ‘02, we were able to get in direct contact with a couple of Google employees (not an easy thing to do!) who are helping move the process along. I am also really proud of our very talented staff who had thought through the process so thoroughly that even the Google staff were impressed by the questions that we had.

Though the Google Apps blog will contain all the details, here are the things that we are working on:

• Single Sign on from Electronic Portfolio to Google Apps – After a student has been moved to GAE, she/he will get a link pointing to GMail in EP. When EP is down, we need to provide an alternate way to get the student to GMail.
• How best to transfer existing email form our servers to Google. Google provides a very easy tool to accomplish this, but some students may require help doing this, so we are figuring out how best to do this.
• How best to transfer existing contacts from our servers to Google – this is another one where we believe with proper documentation, everyone should be able to do this.
• How best to deal with Email when you already have a GMail account? We will make some recommendations.

Few more things that the article did not address:

• We are planning to transition all undergraduate students first; Jolee West, Director of Academic Computing, who is the Co-Chair of the WSA/IT Committee will contact the Graduate Student Association to have a conversation with them to plan their transfer. We will do the same with GLSP students.
• The GAE users will not see the advertisements that one sees in Google.
• When a student graduates, these advertisements are supposed to appear. However, Google has no mechanism currently for us to inform them who have graduated. So, until this mechanism is in place, no one who will see advertisements.

I want to thank the members of WSA/ITS Committee for working with us on this major project. They brought a lot of thoughtful suggestions to the table and I feel good about the way the project is progressing.