In the middle of talks with Microsoft, U of T is planning to adopt Live@edu as its new email service, replacing UTORmail.
The move to Microsoft comes after four community consultations attempted to identify students’ email needs. Chief Information Officer Robert Cook and his team found that UTORmail is “near-end-of-life” and no longer meeting demands.
They concluded that developing a new system built especially for the university will be too costly, recommending that the university consider a more cost-effective partnership with Microsoft.
“Outsourcing is definitely a good step by the university, but given an option, I’d rather switch to Gmail than to Live@edu because of its cleaner interface,” said Andrew Butson, a history major. Director of Planning, Governance and Assessment Marden Paul disagrees.
“We had to choose between Google’s innovation and Microsoft’s stability, and we felt that with Live@edu, we can expect more consistency,” explained Paul. “It’s a trade-off that U of T will benefit from.”
Live@edu will offer 10GB of memory space compared to UTORmail’s 100MB capacity. The new service will have a “more sophisticated” calendaring system and include new additions like SkyDrive file storage, Microsoft Office web applications, instant messaging, audio and video chat, and mobile browsing.
“Once U of T and Microsoft agree on the contract, the university will surely see an explosion in communication,” gushed Cook.
But while most agree that U of T is making a smart move, some still have reservations about the incoming change.
“As much as I support the university’s decision, I want to make sure that none of these new offerings will come at a price,” said English and Women’s Studies Major Janelle Velina.
But Paul assures that though the university will incur some costs for implementing the new system, the service will be free for all students.
Charissa Hussain, a Psycholinguistics major is mainly concerned with Blackboard’s connectivity. “I usually receive announcements from Blackboard through UTORmail and having this feature will probably be the deciding factor of whether or not the students support the new system.”
To ease Hussain’s concern, the contract outlines that the new email system will not only support Blackboard but ROSI as well. There will be no advertising or data-mining and the content will be owned by the university and the students themselves. All emails will also be subject to the laws of Canada while passwords will be under the supervision of U of T.
Research done by Cook and his team found that 28 per cent of institutions in the US have outsourced email providers, rising from a mere five per cent two years ago.
Out of all the major Canadian universities, University of Alberta was the first to enter a contract with Google while others are still in the process of considering the switch.
“The best possible scenario is that we will have a pilot set up around May, start rolling it out for incoming students by September and migrate current students to the system beginning fall,” said Cook.
New accounts will be under the domain “mail.utoronto.ca” while old users have the option of switching to the new provider and forwarding content to their emails.
Correction: A previous version of this article attributed quotations from Marden Paul to Martin Loeffler. The Varsity regrets this error.
