On Sept. 24, Emporia State switched the old Novell GroupWise email system to the new Gmail system for two main reasons – the amount of mailbox storage and the time emails were able to stay one file.

Cory Falldine, director of user support for Technology and Computing Services (TCS), said GroupWise was an old, outdated system, that students’ emails were limited to 10 megabytes and emails could only be saved up to 180 days or 6 months.

“We determined that we would actually be moving them to an outsource solution, and the outsource solution we are using now is Gmail,” Falldine said. “We have created a separate email address domain in Google which is the ‘@g.emporia.edu.’”

In addition to switching to Gmail, employee, faculty and staff accounts have been moved to Microsoft Exchange or Outlook.

“Gmail can give 10 gigabytes and will keep all the emails permanent – it will stay there as long as you want, so students don’t lose their emails after 180 days anymore,” Falldine said.

Falldine also said that Gmail provides access to different Google applications like Google Chat, sharing library documents with other students and other staff, etc.

But some students have different opinions on the change.

Yuichi Nemoto, junior information systems major, said he thinks it is more of a hassle to access his email account in BuzzIn.

“When I log on to BuzzIn, I have to log in twice to get into my email,” Nemoto said. “It’s inconvenient. I can’t see the ‘email’ icon in BuzzIn layout anymore.”

Samuel Schmidgall, sophomore secondary English education major, said that he had not seen any notable differences that made him care either way.

“I go through both emails. I can’t avoid missing emails, but I wish they wouldn’t change my email address because I’m getting confused how to choose which one to write down for my email address,” Schmidgall said. “I do wish this was done over the summer, instead of doing it in the middle of our classes.”

Shi Qiu, graduate business administration major, said he likes the Gmail accounts because it has a larger storage capacity than the Groupwise. He said he also likes that he can now search for other people’s email addresses. However, he also pointed out that he was not sure about whether he would receive emails from the old email address.

But Falldine said both the old mailbox address and the password to it should work as well. All the emails sent to the GroupWise system mailboxes are forwarded to Gmail.

Jingwen Zhou, senior psychology and economics major, said it was a great change because it is a good trend in the development of technological adaption for ESU.

One complaint Zhou had, however, was that she lost some emails the day GroupWise was disabled and that she was not sure whether the teachers’ email addresses were changed as well.

“There is one struggle we are still working with the address books,” Falldine said. “In our ‘@g.emporia.edu’ domain, students’ (emails) show up, and students can see other students, but right now, students can’t automatically see faculty and staff, and that’s something we’re working on.”

Falldine suggested that students look up their instructors’ emails on the faculty and staff directory on the ESU website for the time being.