ASU Announces New Email System in Partnership with Google

ASU meet GmailI can’t contain my excitement. After years of complaining about the sub-par email system at Arizona State University they finally made the switch.

Here is the email I received a few minutes ago.

“Arizona State University, in partnership with Google, is excited to announce a new, improved student email system with email, calendaring and IM built on Gmail and Google’s other collaboration tools. The benefits to you include:

• A massively increased storage quota – 2 Gigs

• Shared calendaring to coordinate schedules with classmates

• Instant messaging capability right from your inbox

• A search mechanism to mine your emails

• Improved spam and virus filtering

Best of all, you keep your current asu.edu address, keeping you connected with the ASU community and ensuring seamless email delivery. You will continue to login to email as you do other ASU systems – using your ASURITE User ID – and your EMMA archive will be available after the switch. The complete transition to Gmail for ASU and the decommissioning of EMMA services will occur in January 2007, but you don’t have to wait.
For more details or to sign up simply click http://www.asu.edu/emailsignup. For frequently asked questions, please visit http://gmail.wiki.asu.edu.”;

I have heard of other universities partnering with Google and Microsoft to manage their student email systems but never thought ASU would follow. ASU will not be switching faculty and staff email’s to gmail. ASU plans to continue using Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 for that. A large number of employees (including the President) use a BlackBerry so, until Google comes out with a competing system for professionals that won’t change.