E-mail Upgrade Planned for Fall

By Connect Mason Director Whitney Rhodes

When George Mason University students log in to check official university e-mail this fall, they may find five or more gigabytes of storage space at their disposal.

The Mason Information Technology Unit created a Student E-mail Outsource Project chapter on April 14 to evaluate the use of Google or Microsoft services for student e-mail.

“We don’t get many complaints about e-mail because the system runs and it provides webmail that all students use,” said Walter Sevon, executive director of the Technology Systems Division at Mason and E-mail Project sponsor. “But we know that we aren’t providing the services that either Google or Microsoft provide.”

Microsoft’s Live@edu and Google’s Apps for Education offer the following free perks:

• Five or more gigabytes of email storage
• Collaboration tools
• Shared calendars
• IM client (Google only)

Both services offer advertising-free inboxes for students, but not for faculty or staff accounts, said Sevon. The advertising-free interface goes away after graduation.

“They’re doing it to get the students to stay with the service when they graduate,” said Sevon. “They want to hook you early.”

Other universities have chosen to outsource their e-mail through one of these two services. The University of Virginia offers both Hotmail and Gmail to students, according to an e-mail sent by Microsoft to Sevon.

Despite the benefits of outsourcing e-mail with these big companies, Mason administrators are reluctant to immediately throw the switch.

“These are big companies,” said Sevon, “we want to make sure the support is there for the students, if there’s a problem, today you call us, but …”

Privacy is another issue.

“Students are getting their grades and official e-mails from the university [through e-mail], we’re not sure we want that scanned by everybody,” said Sevon. “What are the FERPA guidelines behind that?”

“And then what happens at the end of the three-year period if they want to stop offering the services?” said Ron Secrest, E-mail Project manager. “Then we have to take it back in-house or find another provider.”

Yet five gigabytes and an assortment of collaboration tools are pretty hard to pass up, especially when faced with the current Mason e-mail system.

“I’m 110% for the Google offering because it’s the service that students use and prefer already,” said Ravi Udeshi, a sophomore government and international politics major and former candidate for 2008 Student Body vice president.

Udeshi was a part of the Student Senate's Feb. 28 resolution in favor of upgrading the e-mail system.

“As much as I'd love to see the Google offering, even if we went to the Microsoft offering it’d still represent a significant improvement over our current e-mail system.”

• Check out the powerpoint presentation Udeshi presented to the Student Senate before the e-mail resolution was passed.

Sevon and Secrest hope to decide on a service by the beginning of June and put the new e-mail system in place for the 2008 fall semester.

“We’d like to [decide] before everyone leaves because we think the students are important contributors to this process,” said Sevon.