Undergraduate, graduate and professional students at Cornell may now set up accounts on Google Apps Education Edition, a free suite of online communication and collaboration tools for educational institutions. New students entering in the fall will set up their access to the service when they activate their Cornell NetIDs. The service offers e-mail, personal calendars, instant messaging, Web site space and secure ways to share and work together on documents.

The move is the first step in Cornell's plan to outsource student e-mail. A similar service, Microsoft Live@edu with Outlook Live, is expected to be available by the fall 2009 semester. Students then may choose either service as their default provider for e-mail and will have access to the other functions of both services.

Both services offer students mailboxes that are more than 20 times larger than what Cornell now provides. The new services will be called Cmail (Google Apps) and Umail (Microsoft Live). Students will continue to use the "@cornell.edu" address they have now and can choose to have their e-mail delivered to either Cmail or Umail (once it is available) or to another external e-mail service, or to a combination of these.

When students graduate, they will be able to continue using Cmail and Umail without interruption or any action on their part. Students graduating this spring may set up Cmail accounts until Sept. 30.

"The biggest win is the types and quality of the services our students will receive, which far exceed anything Cornell could afford, especially under current economic conditions," said Polley McClure, vice president for information technologies. "The collaboration tools and e-mail storage capacity are unprecedented for our students."

The decision to offer Google Apps and Microsoft Live was made in 2008 at the recommendation of the Task Force on Student Personal Productivity Services, commissioned by McClure and composed of seven students and eight faculty and staff members. The task force determined that only Google and Microsoft offer services appropriate for Cornell students and recommended offering both vendors' products to give students greater choice and minimize the university's risk in contracting with external vendors for these services.

A separate task force evaluated the e-mail and calendar needs of Cornell faculty and staff, and determined that a university-run Microsoft Exchange service was the best fit. Faculty and staff will begin using that service in September 2009.

Students should set up their accounts through Who I Am. More information is available at http://www.cit.cornell.edu/news/index.cfm?id=51663.