I was reading the comments about gmail and there appears to be a lot of support for switching. But I wonder if that isn’t because the comments are from students who mainly use webmail, which I think is not as easy or powerful as windows outlook. Please be sure to gather staff and faculty preferences on this issue since so much of our work happens over email.
From Brenda
Dear Brenda,
Thanks for your comment. We will be sure to discuss this widely across the College community as we investigate our implementation of Google apps, since it does, as you note, affect a system that all of us use heavily.
The good news is that we’re not pioneers in doing this: many in our own community are already familiar with GMail, and other colleges around the country have already successfully implemented Google apps (including GMail) for student, staff, and faculty use.
I’d like to add that I’ve been doing all of my email and scheduling in the Google Apps for Higher Ed instance since around June, 2009. I have yet to find a feature of Outlook that I used missing in the app suite. In many ways, I prefer this tool for email because it bundles related messages together automatically and provides a faster search of my archived messages.
I know there’s still a lot of details to work out with the transition to this new platform, but I think that people will be happy with the system when we get there. Also, I was one of the people who wrote my encouragement on the suggestions poster 😉