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UCLA to outsource email accounts to Gmail

By James Barragan

Oct. 31, 2011 2:20 a.m.

Correction: The original version of this article contained multiple errors. The last ITPB meeting was in June. Kristina Sidrak was invited to speak at the meeting and is not a voting member of the board.

After two years of planning, the UCLA Information Technology Planning Board voted Friday to outsource university email accounts to Gmail, a move greeted enthusiastically by students.

Noticing that student use of Gmail substantially surpassed the use of Bruin OnLine accounts earlier this year, members of the board chose to look into migrating university accounts to the Google service.

The shift to Gmail will establish a new domain,

@bruins.ucla.edu, that will allow the campus community to access Google’s collaboration tools, such as Google Docs and Google Calendar, through its UCLA email accounts.

No additional funds will be required for the switch, said Julie Austin, head of Information Technology at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and chair of the task force heading the transition.

Undergraduates, alumni and retirees will be able to access the new Gmail accounts. The current Bruin OnLine system will be phased out over the course of the next two years, Austin said.

Faculty and staff will not see accounts transferred to Gmail and will remain on their current BOL accounts because of complicated legal and privacy issues surrounding work and research, said Jim Davis, vice provost of Information Technology.

A timeline for completion of the switch has not been set, but Gmail accounts might be available for students by the end of the academic year, Austin said.

Officials implementing the switch intend to have the option ready for next year’s freshman class, Austin added.

First-year computer science student Steven Holtzen said he already forwards his Bruin OnLine emails to his Gmail account. He added that the full switch to Gmail would just reflect what many students already do.

Steven Armstrong, a first-year biophysics student, said he prefers Gmail for its user-friendly aspects. Many of the links sent to his BOL account are cut off because the system lacks some of the technological capabilities of Gmail, Armstrong said.

“Overall, the way the BOL email is organized isn’t very efficient,” Armstrong said. “Gmail will be a lot better than BOL because (BOL) is so hard to use.”

The board delayed the move in June to do more research regarding privacy and security issues that would be affected by the switch and to help design a smooth implementation process, said Kristina Sidrak, internal vice president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, who was invited to speak because of her involvement with the Outsourcing Student/Alumni Email Task Force.

To address this, the board’s implementation technology team is discussing encrypting UCLA Gmail accounts to protect them from anyone attempting to see private information sent in emails, Austin said.

For the moment, the switch will not apply to the graduate student population, Sidrak said. She added that some graduate students have expressed interest in switching to Gmail accounts.

The UCLA School of Law has used Gmail accounts since 2009 and has offered its advice for the implementation process, Austin said.

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