Tmail’s monopoly on the e-mail of UT students will soon end, with the impending implementation of Google and Microsoft services as new options.
The university’s Technology Advisory Board — a committee made up of both students and administrators — approved the decision at the end of the fall semester, SGA Student Services Director Jamie Lonie said.
Options for outsourcing e-mail whittled down to Microsoft and Google, and the decision was to use both.
“We’re doing Microsoft first because we’re currently on Microsoft Exchange,” Scott Studham, chief information officer, said.
About 10 students are currently trying out the Microsoft service, and some students should be able to migrate over to the Microsoft service later this semester, Studham said.
“Starting next semester, new students would be using it,” Studham said. “And then we’ll start adding the Google service as well.”
Though the contracts for both services are free, university staff needed to work through the university’s mail environment and troubleshoot any problems.
“When you’re serving 60,000 people who’ve got everything under the sun in terms of what they want to read their mail with, there’s a lot of testing to do,” Studham said. “It’s not something you just flip the switch and hope it works.”
And since student feedback insisted on maintaining the UTK.edu e-mail in its current form, netid@utk.edu, the process was delayed further.
“I’ll be honest, that requirement made the project much more complicated,” Studham said. “Because we could have had lastname@microsoft.utk.edu and lastname@google.utk.edu. ... Our mail would have routed. Right now we have to have all the mail delivered here (the UTK.edu server), and we have to sort it and route it (to Google or Microsoft).”
He said having the word “google” or “microsoft” before utk.edu in the e-mail address would have allowed the university to program its network so e-mail would automatically route.
“We would configure computers on the Internet to say, ‘When you get e-mail that’s routed to anything@google.utk.edu, send it to Google,’” he said. “Don’t actually send it to Knoxville.”
Lonie said keeping the e-mail address in its current, abbreviated format was worth the extra effort.
“That kind of domain name, UTK.edu, was an identity for students, and even when we’re applying for jobs or signing up for services online, that distinguishes us,” Lonie said. “We’re part of the University of Tennessee, and I think it’s a great thing that we’re able to keep that identity for us.”
Despite the additions of the two services, Tmail does not have an expiration date.
“We’ll continue supporting it (Tmail) for quite a while,” Studham said. “This is more of students asked for an additional service. We’re not going to turn off Tmail. People want to keep using that one, too.”
Lonie said he thought Tmail would continue to be available to students, but it would become unpopular once news of the features of Google and Microsoft’s services reached the student body.
Studham called Tmail “not a necessarily well-loved service,” citing common complaints like the e-mail client’s interface on non-Internet Explorer browsers and the inability to delete multiple e-mails at the same time.
In addition, Tmail offers undergraduate students in the range of 102.4 megabytes to 153.6 megabytes, and faculty, staff and graduate students receive in the range of 256 megabytes to 307.2 megabytes. Meanwhile, the Microsoft service offers 10 gigabytes of e-mail storage.
Plus the Microsoft service provides 25 gigabytes of storage for any type of file on Windows Live SkyDrive, which Lonie said “eliminates the need for flash drives.”
Studham said, “If you’re working on a paper with people in your class, you can give your team access to your subfolder in your SkyDrive and say, ‘Here’s where we’re collaborating on the paper’ and put the documents there.”
Outsourcing e-mail is the culmination of years of collaboration between SGA and administration, Lonie said.
“We think that the benefit of outsourcing to these companies is definitely going to be really great for the students,” he said.
“There’s loads of extra features. It will hopefully alleviate some of the stresses students have felt with Tmail.”