Outlook Student Press
The IT Department has begun switching over all SUNY Rockland Community College e-mail accounts to Google Gmail, a change that will allow for more storage and offer new features and stability.
It has been a long awaited changee-
a project the campus IT department has worked on for over two years. The migration will be an automatic streamlined process that will be done over a transition period of a few weeks.
"All active student e-mail accounts will be moved to RCC Gmail automatically-students will only need to reset their passwords afterwards, we'll take care of the rest," said Mike Donovan, Assistant Director of Information Services in the IT Department.
To avoid any disruption in service, the transition will be done during hours that the e-mail system is not in use, until everyone is on the new system. All e-mail addresses and the domain will stay the same, so it won't affect any lists the address are used for. Folders already setup in the old system will be migrated into RCC Gmail as Labels.
There are many benefits to the new Google Apps Mail. Google provides plenty of storage for each account. With that much space, students won't get constant e-mails warning them that their accounts are reaching the storage limit, causing other e-mails to get deleted.
Gmail has one of the best spam filters and they are constantly improving it. Spam, in the past, was one of the reasons some students were reluctant to use their RCC e-mail account.
A useful feature enabled by default by the IT Migration team to help identify messages just by looking at the inbox, is "Personal Level Indicators" -an arrow system that indicates how the message was sent. Double arrows next to a message indicate the message was sent to this particular address, a single arrow indicates that the massage was Carbon Copied, no arrow indicates that the message was mass mailed.
RCC Gmail has also integrated features with Google Calendar and Google Docs. Users can now use Google calendar and sync it with outlook. They can also share their calendars with other people and groups.
The same is true with Google Docs, which is integrated with Google Apps Mail. Students can do their homework, save it in their e-mail account, and later retrieve it from anywhere. Google Docs can be made public for other people to see, or can be shared with other people and they can collaborate in real time. Also, users will be able to share their Docs with everyone at RCC with just one click.
There are other subtle benefits to Google Apps Mail. Google has integrated chat with Gmail, users will be able to chat with each or even with a group of people in the same window. It's even possible to send and receive text messages in a chat.
RCC Gmail also has the same mobile support that personal Gmail has, which Google is famous for. A feature that applies specifically to RCC Gmail is that users will be able to have their RCC and Personal Gmail open simultaneously, which is not possible with two Personal Gmail accounts.
The switch over will also ensure better accessibility and
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