College to switch to Google Applications 'as soon as possible'
By March 31, all Macalester students, faculty and staff should have access to Google Apps e-mail accounts
By: Amy Ledig, Managing Editor
Issue date: 3/14/08 Section: News
OCS' shoddy performance has become the excuse of choice on campus among students for things not happening. It has also legitimately caused disruptions with accessing emails and communicating with professors and classmates, arranging interviews and working out details for summer internships and programs.
"Initially I was pretty excited because if the professor can't send me an email, I don't have to do my homework," Rose Holdorf '11 said. "But it's problematic because it's right before midterms, there's stuff you can't [get to.]"
Staff and faculty have also been disrupted by the frequent downtime in the last few days.
"Everything takes so much more time, and it's so much harder to send group emails," said Eily Marlow, associate for the Lilly Project. "We get into the habit of saving correspondence, and that's impossible to get to."
"We had to reprioritize," Internship Director Michael Porter said. "We just finished placing 122 interns. It just kind of slowed everything down."
Not everyone is so convinced that the system being down is such a bad thing, though.
"I'm conflicted because I hate e-mail and I'm glad that I can't get mine, but there are important jobs one has to do," Religious Studies professor Jim Laine said. "I lived in the pre-e-mail era at Macalester, and we used to send handwritten notes to students through the SPO [and voicemails]."
He added that the Asian Studies department had trouble promoting speakers who were coming because of the email situation.
Timing seemed to be on ITS' side when it came to making the decision to switch over sooner than they had anticipated.
"It was ready and we felt really confident with the selection and recommendation [of Google Apps,] so that was really in Mac's favor," Sanders said. "The accelerated schedule was just logical."
Rather than expending more resources to bring back OCS to its pre-power outage status, the college decided it made more sense to move forward with implementing Google Apps, Sanders said.
"Initially I was pretty excited because if the professor can't send me an email, I don't have to do my homework," Rose Holdorf '11 said. "But it's problematic because it's right before midterms, there's stuff you can't [get to.]"
Staff and faculty have also been disrupted by the frequent downtime in the last few days.
"Everything takes so much more time, and it's so much harder to send group emails," said Eily Marlow, associate for the Lilly Project. "We get into the habit of saving correspondence, and that's impossible to get to."
"We had to reprioritize," Internship Director Michael Porter said. "We just finished placing 122 interns. It just kind of slowed everything down."
Not everyone is so convinced that the system being down is such a bad thing, though.
"I'm conflicted because I hate e-mail and I'm glad that I can't get mine, but there are important jobs one has to do," Religious Studies professor Jim Laine said. "I lived in the pre-e-mail era at Macalester, and we used to send handwritten notes to students through the SPO [and voicemails]."
He added that the Asian Studies department had trouble promoting speakers who were coming because of the email situation.
Timing seemed to be on ITS' side when it came to making the decision to switch over sooner than they had anticipated.
"It was ready and we felt really confident with the selection and recommendation [of Google Apps,] so that was really in Mac's favor," Sanders said. "The accelerated schedule was just logical."
Rather than expending more resources to bring back OCS to its pre-power outage status, the college decided it made more sense to move forward with implementing Google Apps, Sanders said.
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Laura Kling
posted 3/26/08 @ 3:03 PM CST
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080324.wrgoogle24/BNStory/Technology/home
U.S.-based Google spotlighted the university as one of the first to adopt its software model of the future, and today Mr. (Continued…)
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