Out with the old and in with the new. As of Friday morning, VU Gmail will become the exclusive e-mail service for undergraduate students, replacing the outdated VU webmail e-mail service.
The process to switch to a Gmail e-mail service began in 2005 when Vanderbilt’s Information Technology Services department started talks with Google. ITS realized that they needed to replace the old VU webmail server in order to keep up with the students’ demand for additional storage and broader collaborative capabilities. However, incorporating these additional facilities to VU webmail would have cost Vanderbilt $750,000 in start-up costs alone and would have been expensive to maintain, according to Matthew Jett Hall, associate vice chancellor for ITS.
“We decided it would be more prudent to partner with an innovative market leader like Google, so we worked with student government, faculty and student representatives to consider our choices,” Hall said. “Google came out on top.”
The majority of students have already made the change over to VU Gmail, citing additional e-mail storage and the ability to customize the portal page as their main reasons for switching. However, undergraduates still using VU webmail should not have encountered any problems checking their e-mail this morning.
“Nothing will happen to students who have not started using VU Gmail by Oct. 2,” Hall said. “They will be notified the switch has occurred, and will receive instructions on how to complete the migration. We won’t decommission legacy servers until next year.”
However, undergraduates are not the only ones getting an e-mail makeover. By the end of the academic year, ITS hopes to complete the launch of Vmail – a messaging system for Vanderbilt faculty, staff and graduate students. This service will increase network security and will facilitate full integration of phone, e-mail, instant messaging and video conferencing. By doing this, it will allow the university to continue its business of teaching, research and patient care, without having to worry about the email server failing due to the great volume of email traffic at Vanderbilt.
We process over 75 million messages per month, and each day our Microsoft Exchange legacy environments deal with over 900,000 messages in a 24-hour period,” Hall said.
Once the e-mail servers have been updated for all Vanderbilt students and employees, ITS will continue updating the Vanderbilt network by partnering with Microsoft Live@edu to add greater document storage capability to the network. ITS’ work is never complete.
