UC Davis Information & Educational Technology

Next Generation Email Services for Students

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Sponsor: Peter M. Siegel, Vice Provost for Information and Educational Technology

Status update (January 2009):

Approximately 29 thousand student email accounts were migrated between October 6 and December 5, 2008. During the migration, the IT Express Computing Services Help Desk received roughly 300 DavisMail related support calls (about 1% of the total number of accounts migrated). Students will continue to access their accounts through MyUCDavis, and there was no change to their email addresses, login IDs, and passwords. Students who are currently redirecting their email account to another service and want to use a DavisMail account will need to go to the Computing Accounts Web page to select the DavisMail service. While there are no immediate or specific plans to implement the service for staff and faculty, UC Office of the President (UCOP) is looking into a contract with Google that would allow the service to become available to the rest of the campus community. Contact: IT Express Computing Services Help Desk, 530-754-HELP (4357).

Rationale:

The electronic messaging landscape is changing as many students come to universities with their own e-mail accounts through providers such as Microsoft, Google or Yahoo. An increasing percentage of students forward their university e-mail to these accounts. Simultaneously, universities are challenged to provide the rich feature sets provided by these companies and are struggling with the increased costs associated with higher storage volumes, virus protection, and spam filtering. Outsourcing student e-mail may provide a more economical method of addressing these challenges.

Goals:

  • Provide a richer set of collaborative tools for student messaging needs
  • Provide closer linkage to other student communications services (cell phones, IM, etc.)
  • Reduce duplication of services for users that already forward e-mail
  • Reduce costs and complexity of campus data center infrastructure

Process:

  • Provide a system-wide forum for evaluating the viability of outsourcing student email
  • Perform technical and functional evaluations and comparisons of prospective providers
  • Engage key campus constituencies in a discussion of outsourcing student e-mail and evaluation of primary contenders
  • Conduct a student focus group to determine student preferences
  • Draft a set of recommendations for campus review
  • Develop an implementation plan

Groups to be consulted:

  • Campus Council for Information Technology (see membership)
  • Technology Infrastructure Forum (see membership)
  • Undergraduate and graduate students
  • Senior Advisors
  • Council of Deans and Vice Chancellors

 

Reference Documents for Additional Information

General:

Google:

  • Google Presentation to UC-wide Forum - 01/24/07 (PDF 5.7 MB )
  • Notes from system-wide forum with Google - 01/24/07 (MS Word 74KB)
  • Arizona State University Implementation (PDF 65 KB)
  • Louisiana State University Presentation

Microsoft:

  • UC Davis Microsoft College & University Program Evaluation (04/10/06 report to CCFIT) (MS Word 44 KB)
  • University of Texas-Pan American: MSN Hotmail Promotional Flyer (PDF 108KB) | Logging onto Hotmail Flyer (PDF 84 KB)
  • Eastern Washington University MSN Hotmail Set-up (PowerPoint 983 KB)

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