Adelaide University Switches to Gmail

By Greg McNevin

February 26, 2009: While it made headlines earlier in this week for a brief global service outage, Gmail has some more positive news with the announcement that Adelaide University is adopting the service to handle its in-house email.

Following in the footsteps of Macquarie University, Adelaide University’s 16,000-plus students will be migrated to Google’s online email service from March 16, while staff may also make the switch from Microsoft outlook if some privacy, copyright and management issues are resolved.

Students will retain their current email addresses, and all existing mail will be copied across to their new Gmail accounts automatically. Immediate benefits include a significant storage capacity jump, leaping from 250MB to the 7GB Gmail currently offers, and better collaboration features with Google Talk, Calendar and potentially Google Docs at some point down the line.

The service also comes at no direct cost to the students or the university, with the university estimating that the solution will cost only a tenth of what it would have if tackled internally.

"The university has been actively working to find a solution to the increasing challenge of providing quick, efficient and greater capacity email services to students, which is something students at all universities desire,” said University of Adelaide's vice-chancellor and president, Professor James McWha in a statement. “As our student population has grown in recent years that challenge has increased."

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