Last week, the Center for Information Technology announced its plan to upgrade the College’s e-mail system from the creaky ObieMail we currently use to Google Apps for Higher Education. Google offers the service, which includes e-mail, calendaring and document sharing, free to universities and colleges.

While the College will enter into a contract with Google, Director of CIT John Bucher explained that if the College were dissatisfied with Google, there would be no problem under the company’s Terms of Service changing to another system.

CIT plans to start what Bucher calls “the migration process” in a few weeks, and it will be complete by next October. CIT will offer an option for students, faculty and staff to begin using the new service next month. By next fall, the changeover will be mandatory.

Bucher was excited about the plan to move, noting that the current Mulberry system is not equipped to handle the demands of its users. Additionally, the College will save $100,000 a year in e-mail costs by switching from Mulberry.

“[Google] just provides so much more space,” said Computer Systems Manager Jane Zuzek. “We continually run into that issue with people. They legitimately need that. We’re at the end of our space requirement.”

Among other reasons for the change was the fact that the current system is out of date and that outsourcing to Google would allow the staff to work on other projects instead of constantly dealing with e-mail problems.

One of the main concerns that CIT addressed in a recent open forum was privacy and security. According to its privacy policy, Google automatically scans e-mails to match advertising content to the user. However, there is virtually no access to that information outside of Google. The company also does not display ads in their program for colleges.

Bucher stated that e-mail addresses would remain the same. However, despite the new capabilities of Google Apps, he added that CIT would not offer permanent e-mail addresses to graduates due to a lack of staff to maintain support for such a large userbase.

CIT anticipates that the biggest problem with the changeover will be for people to acclimate to the new interface. “In the pilot program we were just so pleased. It made us want to go down this path even faster,” said Zuzek.