Google Apps for Education will be the new university- wide collaboration service, as announced by President Samuel L. Stanley, Jr. in his email on Dec.19. This is a result of the suggestion from the Steering Committee, whose investigation considered issues including but not limited to security, accessibility, and usability.
According to stonybrook.edu/collaboration, once fully implemented at the end of 2012, the suite system will have almost if not all of the campus community connected through the email and collaboration applications. Most notably, this change will move students to the Gmail (Google Mail) emailing system, in an attempt to make the school-wide emails l more accessible.
“I never look at MySBMail. I have three times total,” said undergraduate student Tyler Wilkinson, “And once was because my dad asked to look at it.”
The committee found that when looking through the outgoing emails from Blackboard, 90 percent of them were heading to somewhere other than an @stonybrook.edu email account.
When asked if switching to Gmail would make him more inclined to use it, Wilkinson said, “I would definitely be more inclined to use it [Gmail]…It’d be much easier if it was sent to my Gmail account, especially since those get forwarded to my phone, so no matter where I am, I can read the emails.”
Exclusively designed for schools and universities, Google Apps for Education is a no-cost “suite” of applications that makes for easy integration among multiple media platforms. The apps include Gmail, Google Documents, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Google Talk (included to enable students to video conference in group sessions) and many other services which may be given out to the campus community, upon decision by the school.
Lotus Notes was the former program used for most of these functions. But as co-chair of the Steering Committee Margaret Schedel said, “Lotus Notes was awkward.”
The switch from the lotus notes and MySBMail to Google’s services was not necessarily due to problems with the former system. “Lotus Notes and MySBmail work reliably well; as with any system, users have expressed dissatisfaction with certain features and functionality — that these systems didn’t seem to be keeping up with new developments and modes of use,” said Chris Kielt, Schedel’s co-chair, and Chief Information Officer. “Google Apps for Education will bring immediate and ongoing improvements.”
This decision was headed by an investigation into viable options of technological improvements, led by the Steering Committee. According to Kielt, the Division of Information Technology was looking into new emailing systems before May 2011, the time of his hiring as CIO. But as the search went further, the group decided that email was not the only changed that could be made.
“When I began talking to people on campus, it became evident that selecting and implementing a new email system needed to be one of my first priorities. But, I also observed that we could do more than simply improve email – we could add collaboration services.” In order to keep up with the always changing innovations of technology, Kielt suggests to, “Engage with a cloud provider who would track rapid industry innovation.”
Although the decision has already been made, students and faculty will not be able to switch over to the new system immediately. As the project’s website plans out, the campus community will not be forced to change until September  2012. But implementation and training of the system will begin near the end of the second semester, and elective migrations to Google Apps for Education will start in July.
The switch will not cause any time of lost emails. The committee is currently dealing with other universities that have recently switched systems in order to find the best way to avoid any downtime on the services. According to Google Apps for Education’s homepage, recently four leading universities have switched to their system. These schools include: Northwestern University, Arizona State University, Notre Dame and the University of Westminster.
Stony Brook University will soon be added to this list of top universities switching to Google, seemingly another step in the right direction for the university as a whole.