Friday, Nov. 5, students at the College of William and Mary received an email announcing that the College would switch its primary email and digital calendar platform from Gmail and Google Calendar to Microsoft O365. The shift will begin at the conclusion of the Fall 2021 semester.
This change comes after Google recently announced a new model for education storage policy, which would dramatically increase the cost of digital storage for colleges and universities.
Faculty and staff of the College have been exclusively using Microsoft O365 email and calendar functions since 2017, and this change now allows for all individuals associated with the College to have access to use the same digital platforms. Chief Information Officer Ed Aractingi says the student switch to Microsoft was originally planned for 2019, but a series of delays, including the COVID-19 pandemic, caused the switch to be pushed back to the end of the current semester.
“It was planned for students to migrate over to Office 365 at some point later,” Aractingi said. “My understanding is that it was scheduled in 2019, but due to some delays and then the pandemic, it was chosen to be pushed for a later time. And recently, with a lot of the preparation that needed to be done with partners and for the I.T. staff, who a lot, a lot of reactive folks were involved in COVID response and a lot of these processes. So it was determined that the best time to do it with less impact on students is the winter break, and that’s how it has been planned.”
“It was planned for students to migrate over to Office 365 at some point later,” Aractingi said. “My understanding is that it was scheduled in 2019, but due to some delays and then the pandemic, it was chosen to be pushed for a later time. And recently, with a lot of the preparation that needed to be done with partners and for the I.T. staff, who a lot, a lot of reactive folks were involved in COVID response and a lot of these processes. So it was determined that the best time to do it with less impact on students is the winter break, and that’s how it has been planned.”
In the Spring 2022 semester, the primary email account for students will switch to a Microsoft O365 account, but they will still have access to their original Gmail student account until the end of the 2022 calendar year. All students will also be issued a new email address that ends in “@wm.edu” instead of the current “@email.wm.edu,” which all students are given upon matriculation to the College.
During the Spring 2022 semester, an automatic forward will be put into place for all students, so that emails from their original Gmail accounts will automatically be sent to their new Microsoft accounts, so students can have time to switch their email address to the new format.
The Information Technology department at the College plans on deactivating student Gmail and Google calendar capabilities in December 2022. Students will still have access to the GSuite set of applications, such as Google Docs and Google Slides, after the deactivation of the Gmail and Google Calendar services.
Along with email and calendar access, the switch to Microsoft O365 will also allow students to start utilizing Microsoft Teams for virtual meetings and instant messaging capabilities. The new access to Microsoft Teams will not affect students’ access to Zoom, which was the primary digital meeting platform adopted by the College during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chief Technology Officer Corinne Picataggi was interested in seeing how adding student access to Microsoft Teams could affect which platform becomes more utilized throughout the student body.
“It will be interesting to see how the meeting behavior changes organically, like we’re not going to prescribe anything or enforce any changes there,” Picataggi said. “But given that it’s tied into calendar so easy that you can now have transparency and insight into employees and students working together in the same calendar environment, I think I’m excited from a technology perspective to see how behavior changes as we increase services.”
“It will be interesting to see how the meeting behavior changes organically, like we’re not going to prescribe anything or enforce any changes there,” Picataggi said. “But given that it’s tied into calendar so easy that you can now have transparency and insight into employees and students working together in the same calendar environment, I think I’m excited from a technology perspective to see how behavior changes as we increase services.”
Along with the email that was sent out to students, a webpage was also created to provide additional information and answer common questions about the switch. It discusses how students will need to update their email addresses for consumer services, such as Netflix, that some have associated with their current student email address. Picataggi also mentioned how the College is aware of numerous other concerns and potential issues that students could encounter during the transition period between Google and Microsoft services.
“And we’re also collecting feedback on what concerns there are and then that’s helping inform the resources that we make available,” Picataggi said. “So just in response to that message, we got some feedback on student org accounts, which, you know, I’ve made sure people understood they’re not in scope of this phase. We might look at them in a future phase or listservs. That was a big concern because your name and your email address with the current extension, it might be on a listserv. And so that, we’re looking at a way to make those updates programmatically so you don’t have to go through and manage membership of a thousand people on the list. We’re going to have resources to help make the transition as light of a lift for students as possible.”
Similar concerns have also been expressed at The University of Virginia after their administration announced the same switch to using Microsoft O365. UVA announced that they would be switching platforms in late October 2021, and in response students created a petition to keep their Gmail accounts that has amassed over 5,300 signatures.
Despite no mirroring petition here at the College, many students and groups felt inconvenienced by the upcoming change. Many students reacted negatively to the switch to Microsoft Office, with many publicly expressing their dissatisfaction on social media. Ezzie Seigel ’23 expressed their concerns with how the switch could prove to be hard organizationally, especially with having to manage two email accounts during the Spring 2022 semester.
“I have organizational difficulties, so it’s really hard for me to organize and stuff,” Seigel said. “And so temporarily having two emails, even if it’s the same messages go to the same emails — you know, both emails — and if there are two different calendar systems that I have all of that I’m personally going on, I know I’m going to have a really tough time with it, because this is what happened in my home county, and it really messed me up for a while in terms of assignments. Like, I just got off track and that’s not their fault, but it’s also not something I can fix or make better, necessarily.”
Will this affect alumni emails? Many of us still use our email.wm.edu accounts as our primary email. I did not receive anything on November 5 as described in the article.