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BY ROSARIO PAZ

In print | March 22, 2007

For the many students who are already forwarding their college e-mail to Gmail accounts, life is about to get a lot easier. ITS is currently undertaking a trial of the Education Edition of Google Apps to see whether a switch in Swatmail service from the current interface to a Gmail-based one would benefit the campus community. According to Associate Director of Enterprise Systems Glenn Stauffer, a trial is necessary to determine the practicality of making such a large-scale change.

“Anytime we want to implement any comprehensive system, we have to test things out,” Stauffer said. “We thought the best way to test things out is to run a limited pilot [of Google Apps] using a selected group of students and staff.”

The Google Apps trial will evaluate the applicability of the e-mail service in a higher education setting.

“We’ll take a close look at the performance levels that you get from Google, both in availability and performance of the application,” Stauffer said.

Enterprise Systems is being particularly attentive to two aspects of the application: the usability and the practicality of the administrative interfaces. This entails a thorough examination of each individual application included in the Google Apps bundle to determine the degree to which they are user-friendly, time-efficient, reliable and appealing. This trial will be conducted on a sample of less than 25 students and ITS staff members.

Gmail is only part of the potential switch. As part of the Google Apps Education Edition bundle, various other applications may become available to users.

These include Google Talk, Google Calendar, Page Creator and Documents & Spreadsheets. Users may have the chance to engage in instant messaging, create and share personalized calendars, work on collaborative documents with other users and publish their own Web pages through the aid of these applications. In addition, students would be able to take advantage of the 2 GB of storage provided with each e-mail account.

“The whole integrated suite of applications is something that we don’t offer,” Stauffer said. “[Google Apps] has the capability to go beyond e-mail.”

Currently, ITS uses either purchased or open-source software. Nutsmail, the current e-mail service that was implemented last summer, belongs to the former category.

“The piece that you see online is just an application that we purchased to provide a richer Web interface than we had previously,” Stauffer said.

Google Apps for Education would also be a purchased software, except that it is a freely provided service specifically for higher education. “There is no cost for implementing [it],” Stauffer said, also in reference to the trial use of Google Apps. In addition to providing its services to schools, Google Apps has also been specifically designed for families, small businesses and enterprises.

Gmail may differ in reliability from Nutsmail. According to Stauffer, Google has provided a premier edition of its Google e-mail service that is open to corporations for about $50 per account per year.

“In this version, [Google] guarantees 99.9 percent uptime for e-mail,” Stauffer said. “They have not yet extended that same guarantee for higher education purposes. We’ll be looking closely at that to see it they intend to.”

The trial will compare the “downtime” of Nutsmail versus Gmail, an issue important to students that use the currently provided Nutsmail e-mail interface.

“I’m so happy with Gmail,” Susannah Gund ‘08 said. "I haven’t had to deal with Swatmail since freshman year. I remember Swatmail crashing. It was really hard freshman year. The reason that all the Swarthmore students of the [Swat Sudan] organization switched to Gmail was because everyone was working around the clock and we couldn’t deal with crashes. It really helped us develop as an organization."

Despite the history of Swatmail downtime, it is not the sole factor for students being proponents of the switch to Gmail. Google has catered to the needs of students through its various innovative features that provide convenience in tasks like organizing events, working on a collaborative document with fellow colleagues and simple e-mail conversing.

According to Mark Dlugash ’08, forwarding to Gmail provides an additional advantage during Swatmail downtime. “If you get Gmail forwarded, even when Swatmail goes down, you still get it,” he said.

“It’s great to be able to still have access to Gmail,” Gund said. "I can send e-mail from Gmail and I’m sending it as a Swarthmore student. Until they have this developed, everyone should sign up for Gmail. I’ll be happy to invite them.

“It is frustrating that Swatmail goes down, but that is not the biggest problem,” Dlugash said. “The difference between [Swatmail and Gmail] is so big that there is just no reason to use Swatmail. Gmail is the best software that is out there. It just makes everything really easy. It stacks your messages together, it has an instant messaging feature [and it has] unlimited space. Everything gets saved and archived. It’s not that Swatmail is bad. It’s just that Gmail is really, really good,” Dlugash said.

Despite the availability of Swatmail, there are a number of students who prefer to use Gmail and have their Swatmail forwarded to their Gmail accounts. “About a third of our students forward their mail to Gmail,” Stauffer said.

The Google Apps Education Edition has already been implemented as the choice of e-mail service at other schools.

“There are quite a few CLAC [Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges] schools … that are doing trials and looking into using Google Apps for Education,” Stauffer said.

The implementation of the Gmail based e-mail service, plus a customized assortment of other Google services, may be ready for the next school year. “The proposal is that if this works really well … we would implement this by fall,” Stauffer said.

Depending on the state of results from the trial, ITS will be making more information available about the potential modifications of the current e-mail system throughout the rest of the year.

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