Saint Mary’s is ‘Going Google’

During the last year, the university has been running a pilot of GoogleApps to assess its use for the university. The pilot process has been a successful one with 250 students, faculty and staff from across the university participating.

Pilot users enjoy the new user experience, especially the greatly increased e-mail storage, collaboration, calendaring and connecting to mobile devices. In late July, the final step of having university counsel review the GoogleApps contract for compliance with needs for security, privacy and e-mail retention was completed.

Information Technology will start the transition process to move all current staff, faculty and students to the SMUMN GoogleApps system this fall.

Please watch for information from Information Technology in the HelpDesk Newsletter and e-mails for details on when your account will be migrating to the new system. The intent is to have all current faculty, staff and student accounts with existing @smumn.edu addresses created on the GoogleApps System by the end of August to allow for immediate use of the collaboration tools. Additionally, the process for transitioning e-mail to the new system will be started, with the intent of having all current faculty, staff and administration e-mail migrated by Thanksgiving and current students receiving new messages by January 2012.