In September, the plan to replace Lotus Notes with another service finally received a green light-the majority of students and staff could be migrated to Google Apps by spring 2010.Already this year, new and readmitted students have been issued Google accounts rather than the usual Lotus Notes accounts. This allows them full access to the Google Apps suite of Web-based applications, including but not limited to Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar.

This also means that the amount of storage for mail and other documents is bumped up from 100 megabytes in Lotus Notes to seven gigabytes with Google Apps. The average e-mail is only 59 kilobytes. In simpler terms, the maximum amount one could archive (a feature of Gmail) rather than receive and delete was raised from roughly 1,700 e-mails to about 118,650.

Of course, this mail option is not only available to newly admitted students, but will be given to all of Guilford over the next 18 months. About 75 percent of the IT&S staff currently uses this service through a staff-exclusive migration tool to transfer e-mail, calendar data, address books and documents from Lotus Notes.

“I think this will benefit Guilford by being much simpler to use and much less convoluted than Lotus Notes,” said student and IT&S employee, Adam Clark.

After using Gmail for himself for over a year, he praises the decision to move to Google Apps because of its many advantages.

“The Web interface, coupled with archiving and filters, make it really simple for anyone to use.”

In addition to less stress on the users, there will be far less stress on the server infrastructure. Normally, all of the data for Lotus Notes is stored at Guilford, but Google Apps will store it at data centers across the country instead. However, IT&S stresses that this is not an invasion of privacy – your data still belongs to you.

“We worked with Google on the legal agreement to make sure we still own all the data,” said Director of IT & S Kyle Johnson. “Faculty own faculty data and student own student data but it’s all hosted outside.”

Once all of IT&S migrates, the plan will continue by transferring the staff of Hege Cox Library and then move on to every department. Faculty and staff currently have the capabilities to migrate themselves without the aid of the migration tool. When this process finishes sometime next semester, IT&S expects students to begin making their accounts.

The migration entails signing up for a Google Account and then having your mail transferred to it from Lotus notes over a two- to three-hour time span, during which you can still use both accounts. Even afterwards, the old account on Lotus Notes is still accessible and will be through 2010.

Gmail is capable of POP and IMAP downloading of e-mail from a Lotus Notes account, which means that anyone can get mail from other accounts forwarded to the new Gmail one or vice versa. Both POP and IMAP will forward mail received at one inbox of an account to the inbox of another, simply by giving the username and password for the old account in the POP tab of the preferences.

Because of these capabilities, students may either begin getting the e-mail that would be sent to their Lotus Notes accounts copied or forwarded to their Google accounts.