UoB New Email / Calendar Project

In September we successfully provided email with Google to over 6700 students who started this autumn. They get a new email address for life, which will keep working after they graduate, to help their future employability. From early next year, existing students will be able to register their interest in getting an email address for life with Google, and they will then be migrated in groups after that.

After Christmas we are starting pilots of Google Mail for staff in some support service units and academic departments. Staff keep the same email address they have now (they don’t get the email address for life). The first to be migrated will be a few staff in IT Services to make sure the technicalities work. Then we move on to other departments for users to test acceptability, so the project can react to feedback and make any changes before the main rollout.

We’ve had some strong feedback from staff that they would like their email and calendar rollout to take place at the same time, or at least very close together. Unfortunately we can’t do them both quite simultaneously. Calendar needs to rolled out to all staff on the same day (so we can all book meetings with each other), while the huge volume of email is such that we need to migrate it in batches. We don’t want to take on too much too quickly, but we are looking into what additional resources we’d need to bring the email and calendar rollouts closer together.

As ever – we would love to hear from you about our plans – get in touch here: new-email@bristol.ac.uk

The project team and colleagues across IT Services are working hard to get Google mail launched for the new intake of students arriving this autumn. These students will be the first to receive email addresses on the new email for life service @my.bristol.ac.uk. The two key dates are 7th Sept, when an application for students to choose a mailname is due to launch, and 15th Sept, when the bulk of students carry out online registration. We have a series of check points between now and then to assess progress and make sure we are on course.

Following that, we will move on to the first pilot deployment of Google mail for staff. We already have lots of departments wanting to pilot the service, and were speaking with one of them this morning. We will be piloting with at least two 2 but no more than 4 departments, including at least one academic department and one support service unit. The rough timetable for this is November to January, but we’ll decide the full timetable only when we’re good and ready.

There are lots of other exciting areas, including calendar, mailing lists, and shared mailboxes, but this is a very large project and we have to resist the temptation to do everything at once. So we are doing some early planning on those but the major work won’t start until summer 2012.