“We anticipated an initial surge of early adopters, and that there would be a slow, steady build in adoption rates as news of the ability to move over to Google spread virally among the student population,” Girardi said.
UM’s Google Project team was also charged with creating a Student Google Guide distributed across campus, and promoting the Gmail switch on the university’s official TV station, Wolverine TV, and its student newspaper, the Michigan Daily.
Girardi said the first Gmail reminders were sent via eMail in February, and would continue once a month.
Stephanie Obadda, a communications and computer education manager at Brown University, said the school’s migration to Gmail in 2010 and 2011 hinged in part on helping students and faculty members better understand the switch, and removing lingering fears of devastating eMail loss.
Brown dispatched “early adopters” of the university’s Gmail platform to discuss the eMail transfer with fretful campus community members.
“Often early adopters become powerful advocates of the new system and are reassuring to others who are hesitant to jump on board,” Obadda said.
Seven in 10 Brown students forwarded their school-related eMails to their personal Gmail accounts before the university announced in July 2010 that the campus would outsource its eMail to Google, Obadda said. Brown’s IT department introduced a site, Training.Brown.edu, which listed workshops for new Gmail users.
Brown IT officials didn’t want to transfer eMail on a person-by-person basis, but rather department by department, “really taking time to understand the ways they were using eMail and calendaring and how that would translate to the new system,” Obadda said.
“It’s always difficult to pick the perfect time for a change like this – at a university, there’s always something important on the calendar,” she said, adding that any eMail data loss could be easily recovered because Brown’s old eMail servers haven’t been “retired.” “If there had been any problems, we could have easily accessed and re-migrated their old mail.”
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