Welcome to the Borg!

Georgetown’s email service is moving to from University servers to Google Apps for Education, which means a couple things for you. It’s all spelled out in an email going to out to students later this week (after the jump), but here’s what we’ll get:

• 3 gigabytes of storage.
• Access to other Google services like Reader and Docs. The idea of easier Doc collaborating alone makes this a great switch.
• Email address after graduation, although ads will start then.
• No more drunken emailing.
• Entry into the Google privacy-gobbling machine. Google’s only offering this for free because it will use harvest your data for targeted ad placement, although the service itself won’t have ads. If you don’t want that, you can get a non-Gmail email account.

What won’t change is your email address–it’ll still be netid@georgetown.edu. GW didn’t stick with their old addresses after switching to Gmail and it was a mess.

After the jump, the email that will be sent later this week to students.

Dear Students:

We are very pleased to announce that Georgetown University will replace the current student email service with Google Apps for Education. The change will take place this spring, with new student accounts available in the early part of the semester. Students will keep their netid@georgetown email address which will deliver mail to a new hosted gmail account.

The Google Apps for Education service provides students with the consumer experience they expect while still enabling faculty and staff to deliver course materials via Blackboard and news and information reliably. Students will receive 3GB of quota and the Google email web interface.

Students will also be able to keep their email account once they graduate. While a student is enrolled, there will be no advertisements in the service. When a student becomes an alumnus, normal Google ads will appear as they do in the general consumer service. While the service will not present ads to enrolled students, an integral part of the Google experience is the fact that the content of mail is “crawled” by tools that gather marketing data which supports Google’s business model and ability to offer a “free” service. If a student is uncomfortable with this, he or she may request a non-gmail account offered to faculty and staff via GUMail.

The student email transition will occur early in the spring semester, after the faculty/staff migration takes place in the next two months. You will receive more information after steps you may need to take to prepare for this transition as we get closer to the actual dates. In the meantime please feel free to contact the UIS help desk at 202-687-4949 or via
help@georgetown for any questions or concerns.

We recognize the importance of email today and appreciate the valuable student input we’ve received throughout our decision making process. We look forward to your continued cooperation as we work to bring you a more robust email service.

Flickr photo from user LoicLemeur used under a Creative Commons license

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 6:26 pm and is filed under News, Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.