Student Assembly

Committee Report:
The Student Assembly’s Committee for Information and Technologies

Steven Matthews, Chairman

Earlier this year, Polley McClure, VP of IT, requested to meet with the CIT Committee to discuss migrating to gmail.

Polley presented this option stating that the original intent of the University offering its own email stemmed from the fact most students didn’t have their own email address. Noticing that just about all students already have either a gmail account, or some other third party email host, the administration wondered if the students would consider making the move to a third party. She mentioned that the benefits would be greater online storage, as well as a slew of applications and services offered by third parties. (google calendars/googletalk/googledocs / msn messenger, social networking). Overall, the committee responded favorably to this idea, but raised a handful of concerns. The first, and also largest factor is that if we’re getting email from a server externally, that bandwidth would get tallied in your NUB, and you could be charged for large attachments, etc. Polley, understood this concern and said she’d investigate that, to see if some sort of amnesty could be arranged for mail traffic.

Another large concern was online advertising. Both Google and Microsoft said that webmail would be add free for your four years at the university, but once your account went to an alumni status, you would be subjected to the same advertising. A third concern was tying the university to one corporation could be controversial. Some students may not want to contribute to the global domination of either of these empires. The counter-argument was made that the university already has corporate affiliations.

The committee leaned towards Google over Microsoft, but a strong case was presented for both. It’s likely that a committee specific to this issue will issue a survey over the idea of migrating Cornell mail, and which service to select. Both corporations will probably bring trail versions on campus for students to try out. Overall, the committee liked the idea, but before voting on this issue, we want to have our concerns addressed. Polley said she’d send me an email when she got some answers, so we’re waiting on that.