Google GMail - Why it Matters

In December, after consultation with the IT Steering Committee, DoIT announced we would move forward with plans to migrate all the remaining UMBC student accounts over to Gmail starting January 10. This is progressing smoothly and will be done by before the spring semester starts. In a recent post to the Google Enterprise Blog, Google announced that for calendar year 2010 that they Google Mail was available 99.984% of the year. That translates into 84 minutes of downtime for the year, or 7 minutes a month. What is amazing is that this includes scheduled downtime needed for Google to implement new features. DoIT's goal is to provide the most robust set of IT services possible, whether we provide them directly or integrate third party vendors into our infrastructure. For email, we believe that Google is a great choice for student email and will provide a high quality of service. Since most faculty and staff continue to remain on UMBC's email infrastructure, the good news is that during the most recent fall six months we have had comparable uptime to Google!

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