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• “If we can stop providing that email for students here on campus and redirect it out, then we can take those resources and put them on whatever the priorities are that are linked with our growth and academic excellence.”

  Rick Lesniak

  Director of Academic Services, UBIT

By SUE WUETCHER

Published: September 2, 2009

A new partnership between UB and Google is providing UB students with expanded email capability that is designed to offer quality service while increasing efficiency and saving money for the university.

UB has begun using Google Apps for Education Edition (Google Apps) for about 3,800 students new to UB this fall, including freshmen and transfer, professional and graduate students, as well as 900 May 2009 UB graduates. The implementation of Google Apps, which comes at no cost to the university, is part of the IT Transformation initiative of UB 2020.

Google Apps includes UBmail powered by Google, Google Chat, Google Docs and Google Calendar. Email addresses will continue to feature the @buffalo.edu extension. To comply with HIPAA regulations, students in the schools of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Dental Medicine are not eligible for Google Apps.

Continuing students are still using UBmail, but “if this pilot works out, we fully expect to migrate all student email” to Google Apps, says Rick Lesniak, director of academic services for UBIT. This pilot project for new students will allow UBIT to evaluate the effectiveness of outsourcing email, Lesniak says.

Due to privacy and confidentiality issues, SUNY Counsel in Albany has advised that faculty and staff email remain under the purview of UBIT and not be outsourced to Google, he adds.

Lesniak points out that in addition to email, Google Apps offers instant messaging, a calendar and other Web-based collaboration tools, expanded storage space—7 gigabytes of storage for email and chat, as well as 34MB for attachments—Google search technology and spam management.

The arrangement offers numerous advantages for UB, he notes. Students receive high-quality email service, while the university will be able to recover and reuse resources that had been spent providing email service, managing IT, providing email storage and conducting e-discovery, he says.

“If we can stop providing that email for students here on campus and redirect it out, then we can take those resources and put them on whatever the priorities are that are linked with our growth and academic excellence,” he says.

“This is a UB 2020 initiative—IT Transformation—where we’re trying as much as possible to be as efficient with our IT resources,” Lesniak says. “Many projects were launched as part of that IT Transformation and email was one of those areas that we took a look at: How could we most efficiently provide this for the campus? And if you’re looking at efficiency, free outsourced is something you can’t overlook,” he says. While Google is not charging UB for use of Google Apps, students will begin to see commercial advertising if they elect to continue their Google Apps email account when they graduate, he adds.

Lesniak says that in implementing Google Apps, UB is following the lead of other universities, such as the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, Clemson University, the University of Texas-San Antonio and Arizona State University, which, he point out, is a much larger institution than UB.

“As we look toward UB growth, we’re looking at solutions that are going to be able to survive that kind of expansion. This particular initiative would do that,” he says of Google Apps.

The only glitch so far—“call it a point of customer dissatisfaction, a limitation,” he says—is that students with smart phones are no longer able to access their email through an app; they must use a browser to access their email. When students sign in to their UB email, UBIT verifies their username and password, then passes off the traffic to the Google servers, Lesniak says, adding that an app would only work if UB gave username authentication to Google.