In a two-phase switchover, the UC Santa Cruz campus will retire its homegrown e-mail system and Oracle calendar system and replace them with new, updated versions supplied by Google.
The campus will retire CruzMail late in fall quarter 2011, and move faculty and staff e-mail to Google Apps for Education.
The entire student population has already been moved to Google e-mail as of March 2010.
CruzTime will then be retired and the calendar system will move to Google during spring quarter 2012.
Lisa Bono, a spokesperson for UCSC Information Technology Services, said Google Apps for Education will dramatically increase the level of service provided to the campus – storage, reliability, and security with a “robust and innovative feature set.”
The move is supported by an agreement between the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) and Google. The contract does not require individual campuses to make the switch to Google; instead, it gives each campus permission to implement the Google Apps for Education service.
In the case of UCSC, the campus has decided to participate because its e-mail and calendar systems have become out of date and have reached full potential, Bono said.
“We can’t grow any further with these systems unless we put a lot of money and resources into them, and we just don’t have the ability to do that with the budget constraints,” Bono said. “When the campus looked for next-generation solutions, Google Apps was the best choice. Plus it’s free.”
ITS will provide training opportunities in the coming months.
Bono emphasized that @ucsc.edu e-mail addresses will remain the same. Existing e-mails, files, and current calendar data, will transfer to the new systems and staff and faculty may continue using Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, or other clients to access UCSC e-mail.
For more information, visit http://its.ucsc.edu/google
