Frequently Asked Questions
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Hot Topic FAQs: Does Google s new(March 1, 2012) consumer privacy policy apply to Google@UH?Is Google keeping track of my Google@UH web history? Where can I find additional help and information? What is being proposed and why? What is the status of the project? What will this cost UH? Will I have to change my @hawaii.edu email address? Will I lose my current email? Who will provide support for UH faculty, staff and students? How does the proposed service compare to current services? What will change? Will I have to use the Google web clients to read and send email? What about ads? What resources will be saved by this move? What about data ownership, security and privacy? Will Google be reading our email? What if I use a school, college or departmental email system? What if I already have a Gmail account? What if I hate Google and Gmail? How common is the outsourcing of email in higher education? Then why not migrate only student email? What institutions have gone Google ? Where can I learn more? Does UH have an exit strategy if this doesn't work out? How does this fit into the broader picture of information technology services? Is there anything else I should know? Does Google s new(March 1, 2012) consumer privacy policy apply to Google@UH? No. Google s new privacy policy affects Google s public (consumer) services and does not currently affect Google@UH. There is public concern about data being shared between Google s core services such as Gmail, Docs and Calendar, and their consumer services such as YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, etc. The new privacy policy does not affect Google@UH since consumer services are not currently available to Google@UH users. Is Google keeping track of my Google@UH web history?No. Web History is automatically turned off for Google@UH users. There are no plans to turn this feature on. Where can I find additional help and information?ITS has several online documents with additional information about Gmail and Google Apps:
The Google Apps Help Centers are also great resources for questions and are updated often.
The UH Systemwide Student Caucus gave their support for the project and the migration of student accounts began on February 1, 2011. Migration of all student accounts completed in December 2011 Migration of faculty and staff email is currently in process. Please check the project news page for up-to-date information: Project News The Google Apps for Education service is completely free to schools, colleges and universities. UH does not need to pay Google anything at all. No. Email to your @hawaii.edu email address will be delivered to your Google mailbox and email sent from there will appear to be from your @hawaii.edu address. No. The migration process transfers your email Inbox and folders from the current UH servers to Google. The ITS Help Desk will assist with issues and anomalies. The ITS Help Desk will provide full support for this service, as is done for current @hawaii.edu email. In addition to migration of current email, instructions will be provided for export/import of calendars and contacts from other common services.
UH Webmail users will find that Google s Gmail web client is different than the current UH Webmail client and the MyUH web client. It has many more features, but it definitely represents a change. In addition, Google regularly updates the Gmail web client to add new features and capabilities. Google s virus and anti-spam filtering works differently than the current UH service. In general, the change will be less disruptive to most people than a version upgrade to Windows, Office or MacOS. No. While the Google email (Gmail) and calendar service each support a full-service web client that is far superior to the current UH web clients, Google also supports the IMAP and POP standards for email. This enables use of many of the native desktop and mobile clients members of the UH community prefer to use such as Thunderbird, Outlook and Macintosh Mail. And all common mobile devices are supported. For calendaring, Google supports the CalDAV standard so supported calendar clients include Macintosh iCal and Outlook (via Google s Calendar Sync tool) as well as common smartphones and PDAs. Google allows each institution that commits to Google Apps for Education to decide whether or not to display ads. UH does not intend to enable ads for any @hawaii.edu users. The savings achieved by this change will include the repurposing of current hardware used to support the legacy @hawaii.edu email service, reallocations of staff who currently support the email servers and storage, repurposing of the current servers and storage to other high-priority needs, elimination of the future requirement to replace the current servers and storage when they reach end-of-life, and limited cash savings. There will also be savings to departments that currently administer their own email systems to overcome the limitations of the current UH service and may choose to move to Google@UH to obtain the increased quotas, integrated calendaring with mobile syncing and improved webmail client.
The current email hardware represents a hardware investment of over $250,000 with annual recurring costs of about $200,000 not including power consumption. This is consistent with other universities near UH s size and complexity that have adopted Google Apps for Education and have estimated total savings in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and more. There will also be savings to departments that currently administer their own email systems to overcome the limitations of the current UH service that have indicated their intent to move to Google@UH to obtain the increased quotas, integrated calendaring, mobile syncing and improved webmail client. These distributed savings have not been estimated. Google asserts absolutely no ownership over any UH or customer information or communication. Google uses the same security for customer data that it uses for its internal data and has a far larger security staff than UH. Google Security & Privacy information page: Google Security & Privacy Google has committed that user content is only scanned or indexed in the following cases to provide specific services:
There will be no change to any school, college or departmental email systems. These are email systems with addresses such as @uhwo.hawaii.edu or @soest.hawaii.edu. Only @hawaii.edu email will be hosted by Google. Any personal Gmail accounts you have will stay completely separate from your Google@UH account, mailbox and folders. As can be done with UH s current @hawaii.edu email, which many faculty and students prefer not to use, Gmail can be set up to forward email to any other email service of your choice. This can be a departmental email server, a commercial ISP account or another free service. Outsourcing of email is now a common practice. According to the most recent (2010) Campus Computing Survey, about 58% of campuses are outsourcing student email with another 27% reviewing it. About 15% also outsource faculty email with 23% reviewing this. Google is the most common choice. Some universities that initially migrated only student email subsequently migrated faculty. This has sometimes occurred when faculty found they wanted to take advantage of the improved email/calendar service as well as opportunities for collaboration, including with their students, using Google Docs and other new services. Moving only students to Google would not achieve as significant a level of savings since UH would still incur the costs of running and supporting the current environment for our 10,000 faculty and staff. Such a mixed email environment would also be more complex, with multiple support environments and individuals with multiple roles (faculty taking classes) caught in the middle. Faculty would have notably inferior service as compared to students, and UH would not achieve the full benefits of application integration for student-faculty communication and collaboration. Here are some of the institutions that have migrated so far: Arizona State University, Boise State University, Brown University, California State University (about half the campuses), Case Western Reserve, New York University, Northwestern University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Stanford University, State University of New York (thirteen campuses), University of Alaska System, University of California - Berkeley, University of Delaware, University of Maine System, University of Minnesota, University of Southern California, Virginia s Community Colleges. Some case studies in education are provided at: Over 10 million students, faculty and staff at U.S. colleges and universities have moved to Google. Google Apps for Education information is available at:http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/university.html The Google Apps Help Centers are also great resources for questions and are updated often. The UH agreement with Google gives us ample time to migrate to a new platform. Given the tremendous change in the technology environment, we expect there would be a number of options for either in-house hosting of email or outsourcing to another vendor. We do know that if we had to migrate to a new email environment in the future, we would not deploy the same software and hardware that we have been using since 2002; our current software has not been upgraded with any regularity and was recently purchased by a new vendor (Oracle), so its future is unknown. We would maintain all @hawaii.edu addresses in any new approach, and because Google s offering is standards-based, we would be able to migrate email folders, calendars and contacts. Although UH already outsources credit card processing for its e-Commerce activities, this would be UH s largest move into cloud computing. Cloud computing is an important trend that is transforming the deployment of IT services worldwide, and email/calendaring are already one of the most mature and widely adopted cloud applications. Increasingly, large and small enterprises are using services such as salesforce.com and Google enterprise apps to manage their organizations. In addition to Google, other major IT service providers such Amazon, Microsoft and IBM are all looking at ways to leverage their extensive global infrastructures as platforms to provide cloud services. The National Science Foundation is beginning to invest heavily in cloud computing programs, and U.S. Government IT leadership has also indicated their intent to migrate to commercial cloud services.
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