By Katie Schleiss
All e-mail accounts for UP students will be transferred to Gmail accounts over fall break.
However, all of the work will be done for them.
Instead of students being responsible for transferring their own e-mail accounts, UP's Information Services will take care of everything.
In the short term, it means some disruption for students.
According to Jim Ravelli, vice president of Information Services, students should not rely on access to their campus e-mail during the three-day transition, which begins Friday.
In the long term, the change means more e-mail storage capacity and other improved features, Ravelli said.
Google-based e-mail services provides more e-mail storage capacity than most universities can provide.
UP is joining more than 450 colleges and universities that have already partnered with Google for e-mail and document storage services.
Examples include Dartmouth, Arizona State University, Northwestern and The University of Southern California.
Ravelli said that Gmail has been so successful that Google is now managing over five million student accounts for universities, and that the conversion to Gmail is something that UP has been evaluating for some time.
Only students, not staff, will switch to Gmail.
UP's e-mail transition begins Oct. 16 at 5 p.m. and continues through Oct. 19 at 7 p.m.
During this time, student access to e-mail will be sporadic as mailboxes are moved from Webmail to Gmail.
Information Services will be migrating small groups of students, between 200 and 500 at a time.
If students are in the group getting migrated, then their e-mail account will no function until the migration is complete.
The outage window should last between two to three hours.
Sophomore Marissa Ohlstrom said that she thinks more reliable service and more storage would be cool, but she also said that she never experienced any problems with the old e-mail system.
"I don't have an issue with it," said Ohlstrom.
"If student addresses stay the same, then it's all good," she said.
Students will still be able to log into PilotsUP to check their UP e-mail.
All current e-mail and calendar items will automatically migrate to UP's Gmail accounts.
Current @up.edu e-mail addresses, usernames and passwords will remain the same, and students will be able to forward e-mail messages sent to other non-UP accounts to their Gmail accounts.
Students will keep their UP Gmail accounts as long as they are enrolled.
The new service provides students with far more storage (7GB) and makes finding contact information and sharing documents much easier.
It also implements a calendar platform for better time management.
Students can import their address books and contact lists.
In essence, students get the convenience and storage of a Gmail account along with the e-mail address of an official UP domain.
The maximum size for a Gmail attachment to staff and faculty at up.edu is 10MB, but students have a Gmail limit attachment of up to 20MB.
This means that students may have to reduce an attachment's size if they are e-mailing staff or faculty.
Sophomore Theresa Cutter said she's going to wait and see and then decide if it's a good idea.
"I really can't judge it until I see it, so I really can't say right now," Cutter said.
"At the core of it, I really don't think the change will be that big of a deal," she said.
Ravelli describes Google's e-mail service as reliable, with significant investments made in its e-mail and data infrastructure that guarantees a high level of reliability.
While UP's e-mail system has been extremely reliable, its storage capacity is limited.
Google offers 600 times more data storage to each user than the current e-mail system does.
As part of UP's agreement with Google, there will be no advertising presented to students.
