Two years after Google unveiled Google Apps for Education, Georgetown’s University Information Services has decided to implement the service which will replace the University-run GUMail.
The switch will occur early next semester.
“Really, no university has the dollars to recreate Google,” UIS director Beth-Ann Bergsmark said.
Google Mail accounts will provide students with three gigabytes of storage, as opposed to the ten megabytes students currently have.
A typical GMail account through Google offers most users seven gigabytes.
The expanded storage may relieve UIS of outage problems stemming from limited storage space it sometimes encounters with GUMail.
Other D.C. universities, including George Washington University and American University, have already made the switch, although GW altered their students’ email domain names from “@gwu.edu” to “@gwmail.gwu.edu,” annoying many students. Georgetown students’ email domain names will still read “@georgetown.edu” after the switch.
As part of the new program, which Bergsmark expects to institute by January or February, Georgetown students will have access to Google Mail as well as other applications like Google Calendar, Google Documents and Google Reader. Bergsmark said that for now, the University is only focusing on Gmail integration.
“The majority of students forward their mail right now, so they’re really already there,” she said.
In exchange for providing free services, Google will crawl students’ email to gather information relevant to its targeted advertising.
Students will not see advertisements until they graduate, and students who have privacy concerns about using Gmail will be allowed to use new GUMail accounts instead.
Because of intellectual freedom and property issues, faculty and staff will be getting new GUMail accounts instead of Gmail. The new accounts will hold 256 megabytes.
Unlike the older GUMail system, Bergsmark said, the new GUMail can be expanded if demands on it increase.
UIS does not yet know whether students in the McDonough School of Business will also have their email accounts switched over to Google Mail.
“We may move and we may not,” John Carpenter, Chief Technical Officer for the MSB, which uses a Nowell Group email system, wrote in an email, adding that he is not familiar enough with UIS’s reasoning behind switching to Google Apps to say whether the MSB will make the switch next semester as well.
Before making the switch, Georgetown consulted with several universities that already use Google Apps for Education, including Notre Dame and the University of Arizona, according to Bergsmark.
Rachel Blevins, a marketing and communications specialist in GW’s Information Systems and Services Department, said GW’s students are glad they switched to Google in August.
“It’s been really good,” she said. “Everyone’s really happy.”
