The Office of Information Technology (OIT) is pleased to announce that NC State University successfully negotiated an agreement with Google Inc. that will enable us to provide improved e-mail and other hosted services for students through the free Google Apps Education Edition™ program. This action was recommended by the Student E-mail Task Force in their March 2009 report.

Outsourcing e-mail is a growing trend in higher education because it enables universities to improve technology services for students while reducing costs. The Google Apps Gmail services will give NC State students more than 7 gigabytes of storage per account, something they have been requesting for years but the university has been unable to afford to provide. Based on the current level of student e-mail services, the Student E-mail Task Force estimated that outsourcing student e-mail would save the university an anticipated $60,000 per year. In addition to e-mail, Google Apps Education Edition™ offers a suite of popular communication and collaboration applications designed for schools and universities.

OIT has formed a Google Apps @ NC State Implementation Team to plan the rollout of the new services. While e-mail and related services (calendaring, online document sharing, etc.) will be provided by Google, students will retain their official @ncsu.edu address. We expect to launch a student beta e-mail service by mid semester this spring and are encouraging students to request an invitation to participate by visiting NC State’s Google Web site: http://google.ncsu.edu. The production service will be rolled out over the coming year.

More information about NC State’s implementation of Google Apps Education Edition™ is also available at http://google.ncsu.edu.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 9:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.