In a newly announced partnership with Google, Fordham University will implement Gmail for student e-mail starting in the fall of 2010, the Information Technology Department revealed in April.
The move to Gmail from the current system, Mirapoint, generally met with approval in the University community, will foster a positive budgetary impact, Patricia Carlucci, executive director of special projects in the department of information technology, said. The basic service offering, provided through Google Apps for Education, has no cost to the University.
"It is going to be a Google account like Gmail, but it's going to have slightly different storage limits," Carlucci said.
Though the IT department has yet to determine the exact timeline, it will eventually migrate all student e-mail accounts to the new Gmail system from Mirapoint, allowing students to keep their Fordham e-mail accounts for life.
Students will be responsible for transferring data from their own e-mail accounts and for saving any e-mail messages that they want to keep from the current server.
"Mail is looking more and more like a commodity," Carlucci said. "Universities want to spend their resources on things that are more unique to the university and that move the mission of the university along."
Other institutions that employ Gmail as their e-mail provider include the University of Notre Dame, Georgetown University, Northwestern University, Cornell University and New York University's Stern School of Business. Feedback toward the syste has been positive at these schools.
Carlucci is optimistic about implementing the program at Fordham, both in terms of user-friendliness and in terms of allocation of University resources.
"We started out with a proposal that we should do this in order to make better use of IT resources and to give students a better e-mail experience," Carlucci said.
Additionally, the IT department announced that they would replace Cisco Clean Access, the University's current network security certification system with new software called Fordham Network Access Control (NAC), created by a company called Trustwave.
Most students who use Mac computers are unfamiliar with the system because only people who use Windows are required to employ it. According to Fordham IT's Web Site, Clean Access "checks for the presence of current Windows operating system updates and fixes as well as installation of University approved anti-virus software tools."
The shortcomings of the current system include a limited number of compatible anti-virus software options and the large amount of memory Clean Access requires to run on PCs. Fordham NAC will perform similar functions to Clean Access, such as authorizing users and ensuring that computers meet the requirements for the network. It will not, however, require students to install an agent of authorization and will be "less resource-intensive," according to Cesar Nau, manager of user support for Fordham IT.
Students will need to install anti-virus software, which Fordham IT provides at no charge. Nau said that Fordham NAC will support Symantec, McAfee and Trend-Micro as Clean Access currently does. The IT department also hopes to support additional anti-virus programs in order to provide students with more options, although no plans have been finalized.
The IT department will introduce Fordham NAC on the Rose Hill campus starting May 26 and continue to test it throughout the summer.
Additional reporting by Patrick Derocher, news editor.
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