Although two-thirds of all Cal Poly students forward their school e-mail to a personal account, that number may decrease when the school switches to a new collaboration suite next week.
The new suite’s e-mail interface, created by Yahoo!-owned company Zimbra, closely resembles that of Gmail or Yahoo! Mail.
The collaboration suite also allows students to share calendars, documents, RSS feeds and address books with their peers and faculty.
“These tools aren’t meant for people to e-mail just for the heck of e-mailing,” said Linda Sandy, information services infrastructure director at ITS. “It’s truly about your academic experience.”
Cal Poly’s current e-mail service, Oracle, has received criticism over the past five years of the school’s contract for being slow, unreliable and overflowing with spam.
“I never really liked the web client,” Sandy said of Oracle. “But I know where they were going and I think they would have eventually changed it.”
At noon Friday Oracle e-mail services will go down and the transition to Zimbra will start with an expected completion date of Tuesday, Sept. 2. The calendar implementation will come in late October or early November.
“It’s been a lot of work and we hope that it’s perceived as a benefit to the campus,” Sandy said.
The department expects minimal problems with the switchover after having completed two full “test migrations” from start to finish.
ITS enlisted campus technical support coordinators to assist in reviewing and testing the project, and has reviewed other campus implementations from places like Stanford and Texas A&M to assess the best switchover methods.
For faculty, staff or students who need guidance with the new interface, “hands-on” training will be available in the Robert E. Kennedy Library, room 510B until Friday, Sept. 5.
“People can go in, look at it and sort of get a feeling as to whether they think they’re going to have any problems or just get their questions asked,” Sandy said, adding that she anticipates mostly staff and faculty will take advantage of the labs.
“Students always catch on,” Sandy said. “Students are very, very good at this.”
Students who forward their Cal Poly e-mail to their personal accounts will have to log in to my.calpoly.edu to remove the forwarding feature if they want to try Zimbra.
Information technical consultant Terri Bruns said using Zimbra instead of a personal e-mail will help students maintain a “campus identity.”
“If there’s enough room for people to really do things and to function, then they will really enjoy not having to go out into that world and keep it all at Cal Poly,” Bruns said of students who currently forward their Cal Poly e-mail to a personal account.
Yet the university also knows why off-campus email will remain popular among students.
“We understand that we can’t compete with (Google) or Yahoo for space,” Sandy said. “We just don’t have the resources to be able to offer that kind of storage.”
Zimbra e-mail will allow for 250 MB of storage, whereas a Gmail account provides more than 7,000 MB of free storage and increases that amount by 3.3 MB daily.
But Sandy and Bruns said Zimbra is meant for academic purposes rather than mass storage.
“What we’re trying to offer is more of a collaboration space where students can use the other services that Zimbra provides in addition to the e-mail,” Sandy said.
Although Google provides a document and calendar component very similar to Zimbra’s features, the benefit for students using the Zimbra is that everyone else on campus is already connected through the same system, whereas not everyone has a Google account.
After the calendar system is in place in mid-fall, Sandy said the goal is to create pre-populated calendars with an academic schedule and events. All faculty and staff calendars will be made public for all students, which can be helpful for scheduling meetings and office hours.
Student calendars are private by default because of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), but students can opt-in to make their calendars public.
Bruns, whose department manages Blackboard, said that although Zimbra can be used to supplement Blackboard, it will probably not replace it.
“There’s a lot of features in Blackboard that are really geared towards online courses,” Bruns said. “We really want to look at using that to its full benefit rather than just a means of sharing a particular document.”
Tom Sciortino, an equipment systems specialist for media distribution, was one of about 100 staff members who helped test and troubleshoot Zimbra prior to its release.
“I found maybe two or three problems, and they were really obscure stuff that most people wouldn’t run into,” Sciortino said.
One minor problem he noticed is that e-mails will disappear for Mac users who check their e-mail via IMAP if they create folders within their inbox – something he said most people wouldn’t do anyway.
“In general, it worked pretty nice,” Sciortino said. “It was really elegant. Very drag-and-drop. Stuff that you’d expect to work does work. It’s very intuitive.”