Decision on moving BruinOnLine put off until fall as planners work on a formal proposal for implementation, work out privacy and security details
By Ashley Luu
June 27, 2011 6:16 a.m.
A decision on the proposal to move Bruin OnLine email services to Gmail has been pushed to the fall, with the task force leading the initiative using the summer to prepare a detailed plan for implementing the switch.
At the Information Technology Planning Board meeting on June 20, a group of faculty and students presented a detailed report recommending that the university proceed with outsourcing student, alumni and retiree email accounts to the Google service.
Before the board can make a decision, however, the task force must create an implementation plan, said Jim Davis, vice provost of information technology and an ex-officio member of the voting board.
In addition to drafting a possible implementation plan, a task force is working to resolve legal, security and privacy issues involved in the risks and benefits of Google’s collaboration tools, such as Google Docs and Calendar, Davis said.
He added that the campus did not have the resources to build its own collaboration tools.
The risks of these tools, however, lie in the protection of university data, which would be stored off campus and subject to use for marketing purposes, Davis said.
With sensitive university data such as medical patient information and graduate student research, resolving security and privacy issues is one of the major concerns moving forward, Davis said.
In terms of protecting campus research, the task force is recommending that the provision of graduate student email be determined by individual departments, which have a better understanding of the types of data students work with.
Despite the university’s concerns over outsourcing email, the UCLA School of Law implemented Gmail as a pilot program in late 2009. More than 90 percent of students signed up for the optional service.
Similar to undergraduates’ response to the BOL email service, the majority of law students were dissatisfied with iMail, the old system at the law school. Negative feedback prompted the law school’s information technology staff to outsource student email to Google, a move that doubled student satisfaction from 40 percent to 80 percent, according to surveys the law school’s IT staff sent out in 2009, 2010 and 2011.
Along with increased satisfaction, the law school’s IT staff was able to cut costs and improve the efficiency of student email, said Albert Woo, the chief information officer at the UCLA School of Law.
“Google is free, and obviously it took some programming time, but with our old email system, you have to pay annual maintenance and put it on a physical server,” Woo said. “So, we did see some savings.”
Including the pilot program phase, the transition to Gmail took a little more than a year, Woo said. The larger size of the undergraduate student body will make the process of outsourcing email for undergraduate students take considerably longer, he added.
Nearly two years after the task force began its initiative, the proposal is still in the planning stages because of the systematic process outlined by UCLA’s IT governing structure.
The law school and several other UC campuses have already made the switch to Gmail, and the task force hopes to learn from these experiences by following the IT governing process and working closely with the Information Technology Planning Board through analysis, recommendations and discussions.
“We’ve tracked a lot of campuses that have done this, and … every campus that has tried to move forward without having that discussion in earnest has had to backtrack,” Davis said.
As one of the student representatives on the task force, Kristina Sidrak, internal vice president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, emphasized the necessity of following the IT governance process. Despite the delays, Sidrak is optimistic about the initiative’s progress.
Appointed by Davis in 2009, the task force combines the expertise of various faculty members and the feedback of student representatives to analyze whether or not the campus should outsource email and collaboration tools.
“We’re in the middle of the pack, as … many universities have already moved students onto Google or other public offerings,” Davis said. “It was simply time for us to ask that same question.”
