Having students use Google Apps for Education for e-mail communications will provide them with an improved user experience and better service at a lower cost, says Sean Moriarty, acting executive director of Information Technology Services. The department will soon start migrating students to this new service, called UWinGmail.

“Our new service will provide users with more than 25 gigabytes of storage space, compared to 100 MBs in the current system,” Moriarty says. “In addition, students will gain access to other services, including calendaring, chat functions, and the Google Docs suite of products. UWinGmail uses Google’s familiar Web interface, so it will also improve ease-of-use and comfort for students.”

Other features will remain the same—for example, students will retain their @uwindsor.ca e-mail addresses and the University’s spam filters.

Because of the volume of use, the department is undertaking the migration in small groups.

“We have almost 29,000 accounts to move to UWinGmail,” Moriarty says. “To manage the load and ensure the process for any individual is completed in one day, we will group students based on major and year of study so that users in the same program are migrated together.”

Students will engage in a three-step process that will begin once they receive an “Invitation to Migrate” in their UWindsor inbox. After they respond, IT Services will activate an account and begin to move over their existing data. The students may configure smartphone and e-mail clients, and once they have received notification that the migration is complete, they may review the new files to ensure all their data is intact. The old account will be deleted in 21 days. Learn more about the migration process on the IT Services Web site.

Although there are no plans to migrate employee e-mail accounts to the UWinGmail service, members of faculty and staff will have access to other features of Google Apps for Education.