Webmail moving to Gmail in 2019

Over the summer, ITS worked on a technical and budgetary analysis of the current state of Webmail, which includes personal calendaring, as part of an exercise to explore the feasibility of moving to Gmail. It became clear that such a move would yield significant budgetary savings that could be redirected to more strategic needs of the College. As a result, we will begin a process this fall to migrate the College’s email and personal calendaring system to G Suite Enterprise for Education. Over 40 of our peer institutions have already made this move in the past decade, and what’s more, our use of Google products is already widespread, as Lafayette has deployed many apps (e.g., Google Docs and Google Sheets) within the G Suite environment since 2010. To date, there are over 5,000 users in G Suite, who have created over 2 million documents!

It is important to note the College’s use of G Suite Enterprise for Education is significantly different than the use of a personal Google account, since the educational licensing has several data protections and privacy provisions in place. ITS is planning to continue support for Outlook and Mac Mail, for those who prefer to use these email clients. That said, it is our hope that access to the Gmail web interface will provide an opportunity for individuals to reassess their use of email and calendaring, as the web interface is more feature-rich than that of our current system.

Over the course of the next several months, ITS will provide more details about the migration, and will offer open forums for discussion about the changes. It is our hope that after piloting several groups this fall, we will go live campus-wide in early January, ahead of the start of the spring semester.