UoB New Email / Calendar Project

We like to compare the new look to a chat window on steroids (it’s bigger).  You’ll notice that when you hit the compose button, a new compose window will appear at the bottom of your screen where your chat windows are typically located. Now you can minimize your compose window and have multiple compose windows open at once!  This will help you work more efficiently in your inbox. Since the compose screen no longer takes up the majority of your inbox, you can easily search your inbox and reference another email without having to close or ‘pop-out’ your compose window:

New Compose Features

Now that you have the new compose experience enabled, let’s discuss the changes that have been made and some of the new features. We’ll start at the top, where you enter the recipients of the email message. You will notice that the ‘To’, ‘Cc’, and ‘Bcc’ lines have been combined in the new compose experience.  If you are interested in adding an email address to be Cc’d or Bcc’d, simply click on the Cc and/or Bcc fields to the right of ‘To’ and those fields will expand as seen below.

One watch point here is that when you click on ‘Subject’, the email addresses will be compressed into one line.  If you have added a Bcc, it will be noted that that person is Bcc’d. While you are composing your email, you will always have the ability to click in the recipient field to add or remove people.

Below the subject line (and above your signature, if applicable) is where you can begin to compose your email message.  If you need to minimize, pop-out, or close your email window, you can do so by clicking on one of the three options located in the upper right hand corner of the compose window.

Formatting Options

The formatting options are located at the bottom of the new compose window.  To access these options, click on the ‘A‘ and a series of options will appear.  These include:  Font, Text Size, Bold, Italic, Underline, Font Color, Numbered List, Bulleted List, Align, and Remove Formatting.

Inserting Extras

Another new enhancement of the new compose experience is the ability to insert a number of different ‘extras’ directly into your email.  These extras include:

• Insert files using Drive:  We really like this feature because the majority of Google Apps users use Google Drive to create and store documents.  By clicking on the ‘Drive’ icon, you can now insert items directly from your My Drive, Shared with Me, Starred, Recently Selected, and All Items folders. A very valuable function to note here is that if you have not shared the Google Drive Document with the recipients of the email message, you will receive a prompt to share the document with the appropriate parties before sending the email (thus, cutting out the back and forth requests to access Drive items).
• Insert Photos:  When clicking on the camera icon, you’ll see a prompt to add images that are stored on your computer or via URL.  This new addition replaces the Inserting Images lab.
• Insert Link:  The chain link image allows you to, after highlighting the word or phrase, insert a URL directly into your email content.
• Insert Emoticon:  Who doesn’t like to add a little ‘flair’ to their emails?  Nothing says ‘I’m joking’ better than a silly smiley face.  Click on the happy face icon to view the available emoticons (there are a TON).Insert Invitation:  After you have properly addressed your email message, you have the option to insert an invitation directly into the message.  This can be done by clicking on the calendar icon.  After clicking on that icon, you will be asked to add the information for the invitation.  A great feature here is that the invitation prompt will show the recipients’ availability so you can see if everyone set to receive the email is available.  If they are not available, you can always adjust the meeting time!
  • Tip:  Hold down the ‘Shift‘ key when you need to select multiple emoticons for the message.

*Note* The paperclip image can be clicked to attach any files/folders located on your computer to the email.  The insert extras bar, shown above, will appear immediately when you hover your mouse over the paperclip or ‘+’ icon.

Trash (Bin) & Options

Sometimes, we start an email and then find that the message is unnecessary.  Not to worry, you can easily discard the draft by clicking on the trashcan icon located at the bottom right hand corner of the new compose experience.

The Google products have been built from the ground up with great features baked right in from the start, but they are also extendable. This blog post will look at 4 of the more popular extensions available for you to install.

(Whilst easy to use, these extension unfortunately come with no support from the University)

• Activeinbox – ‘make your inbox your donebox’ - http://www.activeinboxhq.com/

This plugin is like a project management system, just for your email. You can assign priority levels and group emails into projects, so you can focus on the projects/people, rather than the emails. One feature we particularly like is scheduling emails to appear at a time more suitable to you

• any.do – ‘make things happen’ - http://www.any.do/

any.do is a simple task manager that syncs across iPhone, iPad, Android and as a Chrome extension. It allows you to keep track of what tasks you have and at the beginning of each day, plan the day ahead.

• Boomerang for Gmail - Schedule an email to be sent later. Easy email reminders -  http://www.boomeranggmail.com/

Boomerang can send emails on a schedule you define, whilst monitoring replies and chasing them, automatically, if needed

• IEmultitab – Display IE only webpages, inside Chrome - http://www.bristol.ac.uk/it-services/applications/google-apps/chrome/chrome-faqs.html#not-work

Encountered a website that needs IE, but you’re using Chrome? There are some even within the University, but now you can use the IE browser to display them without even leaving Chrome.

There are many, many more available through the Chrome webstore: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/. If you are interested in any, please make sure to check out their privacy policies and conditions of use before installing them.

If you have discovered a useful Chrome extension, let us know in the comments below!

A lot of the questions the project receives revolve around security and privacy. We take the questions seriously and have tried to cover this both in our FAQs, our road-shows as we go around the University and  also in a previous blog post.

To tie all this together, we spent over a year working with the University Secretary’s Office and Google to write a contract that gave significant data security/privacy provisions  over and above their standard business  contract – this contract is now being used by JANET/Google as a basis for a national contract for all UK HE institution’s. In our efforts to be  as open and transparent as possible, you can read the contract online at: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/new-email/privacy-security

But all of the above is action the University has taken to protect it’s staff. Google themselves also take pro-active action in protecting their infrastructure and users against attacks.

Physical Security

Google operate many data centres to provide the services they do and to offer the security and reliablity guarantees that they can. To back this up they have undergone and achieved several independent/industry recognised security certifications, you can find more details on them at Google’s own site: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en-GB/trust/data_protection.html

 Spam

Compared to five years ago, more scams, illegal, fraudulent or spammy messages today come from someone you know. Although spam filters have become very powerful—in Gmail, less than 1 percent of spam emails make it into an inbox—these unwanted messages are much more likely to make it through if they come from someone you’ve been in contact with before. As a result, in 2010 spammers started changing their tactics—and Google saw a large increase in fraudulent mail sent from Google Accounts. In turn, the Google security team has developed new ways to keep you safe, and dramatically reduced the amount of these messages.

Spammers’ new trick—hijacking accounts 
To improve their chances of beating a spam filter by sending you spam from your contact’s account, the spammer first has to break into that account. This means many spammers are turning into account thieves. Every day, cyber criminals break into websites to steal databases of usernames and passwords—the online “keys” to accounts. They put the databases up for sale on the black market, or use them for their own nefarious purposes. Because many people re-use the same password across different accounts, stolen passwords from one site are often valid on others.

With stolen passwords in hand, attackers attempt to break into accounts across the web and across many different services. We’ve seen a single attacker using stolen passwords to attempt to break into a million different Google accounts every single day, for weeks at a time. A different gang attempted sign-ins at a rate of more than 100 accounts per second. Other services are often more vulnerable to this type of attack, but when someone tries to log into your Google Account, the Google security system does more than just check that a password is correct.

How Google Security helps protect your account
Every time you sign in to Google, whether via Chrome once a month or an email program that checks for new mail every five minutes, Google performs a complex risk analysis to determine how likely it is that the sign-in really comes from you. In fact, there are more than 120 variables that can factor into how a decision is made.

If a sign-in is deemed suspicious or risky for some reason—maybe it’s coming from a country oceans away from your last sign-in—we ask some simple questions about your account. These questions are normally hard for a hijacker to solve, but are easy for the real owner. Using security measures like these, Google have dramatically reduced the number of compromised accounts by 99.7 percent since the peak of these hijacking attempts in 2011.

In the future

The Universtiy is investigating the use of ’2 Factor Authentication’, where as well as your username/password, you enter in a unique one time code that you generate using your mobile phone. This gives further security to your Google account, but is one of only several security products we are currently researching.

We hope this blog helps to explain that both the University and Google take security very seriously. If the blog has generated any thoughts or questions, we’d be keen to hear them! You can contact us via email: new-email@bristol.ac.uk

–
Mally Mclane
Communication and Collaboration Services Manager
University of Bristol

Having launched the Google ‘email for life’ service with new undergraduate and taught postgraduate students at the start of the academic year we extended the invitation to our  final year undergraduate students earlier this summer.  As well as offering an email quota of 25GB,  it also provides a University email address that can be used after they graduate.   That rollout was successful, with many final year students taking advantage of the @my.bristol.ac.uk email address.  Soon after our launch with final year undergraduates  we opened it to all undergraduates and taught postgraduates not already using the service.

We now have over 11,000 accounts on the Google ‘email for life’ service and more students are moving across every day. Students using the service have  access to 25GB mailboxes, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google+ and can keep their email address for ever.

Why not join them?

If you are an undergraduate or taught postgraduate student and have not yet moved to the new Google service then you can do so now by visiting the following address:

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/it-services/about/projects/new-email/student-instructions

We are moving along in the project to move the University email service across to Google and we’re very pleased to announce we are now in a position to begin migrating our current students onto our new service!

Apart from the key advantages of providing significant quota and access to University email through Google mail, students will also be able to retain the account after graduation and use the email address @my.bristol.ac.uk.

We will begin with our students who are in their final year this year, along with our taught postgraduates – we’ll be contacting them directly soon with further information. They will have from Monday, May 21st to the end of June to go through our 30second account creation process to create their Google account, which will work instantly.

Then, from July onwards, we’ll be migrating our remaining students onto the email for life service – again, we’ll contact you closer to the time with more detailed information.

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to migrate your actual emails – but we will provide advice on how to do this yourself using Mozilla Thunderbird. While a student you can access your Google email via MyBristol or directly from the Gmail website but when you leave you will need to use the Gmail website.

If you have any questions, please contact the project team via new-email@bristol.ac.uk.

We have 2 Google instances at the University of Bristol – my.bristol.ac.uk is purely for our student user-base (and Alumni in the near future) and bristol.ac.uk is for our staff user-base. The student instance went live last Autumn and we’ll be migrating the remainder of our students very soon (watch out for news!) and our very first staff members will be migrating to Google over the next month.

Although you may think they are the same – we do treat the 2 instances very differently as the 2 user-bases have different needs and function in very different ways. The student user-base is more dynamic and keen to adopt new technologies and services, whereas the Staff user-base is, in the main, more conservative and wants a more stable product.

Fortunately, Google do offer two release paths for their new product. The students are on a Rapid Release track, which allows our users to access new features as soon as Google rolls them out to production. These features have been through testing and quality assurance and are  also available to Google’s consumer users. Staff are on Scheduled Release track which allows us to hold back new features from our users temporarily so we have time to prepare them for the changes. Google releases features to the Scheduled Release track on Tuesdays only, at least one week after the feature was released to the Rapid Release track. Of course, at all times, we can turn any service off or on as we need to.

Why does this matter? Today Google launched a product that we had heard about through leaks, glances and rumours for some time - Google Drive. The Google Drive product is a service that is being launched to compete head-to-head with the likes of Dropbox and box.net. 5GB is being offered for free and there is also tight intergration with Google Search and Google Docs. You can read more about the launch at the link.

http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/introducing-google-drive-yes-really.html

Because of the Rapid Release schedule, we are pleased to say that this product is available now to all student users on the Google service. 

Calendar, Docs, Google+ and much more are now available to students when they get the new Google email for life service at the University of Bristol!

After listening to the feedback from our current students we are pleased to announce that today, Tuesday 20 March, we are turning on over 20 apps from the Google Apps suite including Google Docs and Google Calendar. The full list can be found at:

http://www.bris.ac.uk/it-services/applications/google-apps/

What do these apps offer?

Here’s a quick guide to some of the most widely used and useful:

Google Docs
A suite of products that lets you create different kinds of online documents, work on them in real time with other people, and store your documents and your other files — all online. With an Internet connection, you can access your documents and files from any computer, anywhere in the world. (There’s even some work you can do without an Internet connection!)

Google Calendar
An online calendar that’s available wherever you are, whenever you need it. We are investigating providing iCal feeds for student timetabling via the MyBristol portal, so you will also be able to add your UoB timetable information to your Google Calendar and use the reminder features Google provide.

Google Talk
A instant messaging tool that supports text, voice and video – for free. Use Google Talk to keep in touch with your family and friends back home.

Google Chrome Sync
The University will soon be rolling out the Google Chrome web browser to all UoB computers. With Chrome Sync you can save your bookmarks, extensions, apps, theme, and browser preferences to your Google Account so that they are available on any computer you’re using. That way, you can have the same web experience everywhere.

Please send any feedback to new-email@bristol.ac.uk

Further information on the Gmail project at the University can be found on the IT Services website