Only five months after the University smoothly converted over 15,000 users to Cmail, a Google-based e-mailing system, Cornell Information Technologies is looking to provide a Microsoft-based equivalent, Umail, in the coming months, adding another option for Cornell community members to access their e-mails.

Problematic negotiations have stalled Cornell’s adoption of Umail, but CIT expects the issues to be resolved by February and available for all students by the end of spring, according to Chuck Boeheim, CIT’s assistant director of systems services.

“Microsoft was late with a few features,” Boeheim said, so until Microsoft meets their promise to correct the problems, CIT will not offer the new program.

Google’s Apps Education — the software responsible for Cmail — respects the routing domain of Cornell University; Microsoft’s Outlook-style Umail, on the other hand, does not effectively deliver to Cmail, delivering all emails only to a student’s Umail. Thus, if a student prefers Cmail, they would be likely to miss important messages.

Many students were already avoiding Bear Access and Webmail websites before the introduction of Cmail by forwarding their e-mail to other systems, according to CIT’s Steve Schuster, interim executive director of CIT.

“Before we offered Cmail, we had about one-fourth of the students routing their @cornell.edu email to Gmail, and other places, though Gmail was the statistical favorite. Yahoo, hotmail and AOL were the next three, but they got nowhere near Google in numbers,” Boeheim stated in an e-mail.

Noticing such behavior among students, the University sent Requests for Proposal to Microsoft and Google after the Task Force for Student Personal Productivity Services was created in 2007 to investigate a new e-mail system.

“The suite of capabilities was broader than what Cornell could offer,” Schuster said. “It became very attractive for us.”

The University sought a program with more storage space, less cost and cooperative applications like calendars and documents.

“We announced the new service mid-April, and 6,123 people had moved by the end of April. By graduation it was over 12,000, and it now stands at 15,043,” Boeheim stated. While half of the University has yet to switch to Cmail, Cornell has joined dozens of other universities in its acceptance of Google’s program.

In a blog written by Miriam Schneider and Jason Cook from the Google’s Apps Education Edition team on Sept. 8, Google reported that over five million students in 145 countries use the system.

Arizona State University was the first to adopt the Google system, but Northwestern University soon followed suit in June 2007. Recently, Notre Dame University and Georgetown University have switched. Brown University is converting to Google’s application this month and Dartmouth College began looking into the change last spring.

A major reason for Cornell's decision to switch e-mail systems was cost. Google and Microsoft provide their e-mail systems for free, hoping that college students will become customers once they graduate. In addition, Cornell students will be able to keep their netid@cornell.edu address after they graduate.

“We worked with both Microsoft and Google. In this case the price tag is zero,” Boeheim stated, except for some small local expenses. “The ongoing cost of providing local mail services [on servers at Cornell] is around a half million [dollars] annually, so this is quite a savings for Cornell.” CIT will shut down the local servers once the conversion is complete and Google will store the e-mails.

Incoming freshman — all have Cmail — were automatically entered into the system upon registration. Many of them have positive things to say about the system.

“I like it,” Hallie Anderson ’13 said. “I used to use Yahoo, but I pretty much just use Cmail now. It groups the conversations together and is easier to access.”

“I just used the Google Docs for my anthropology debate and it worked out very well. I will definitely use it again,” Molly Hulbert ’13 said.

Overall, students are positive about the change, but others, like Harry Flager '13, continue to forward their e-mail to other systems. “I don’t actually know many people that use Cmail unless they want e-mails stamped with the Cornell name,” Flager said.

Citing a need for separation between school messages and personal e-mails, Anderson uses both Cmail and another program. “There was too much spam in my Yahoo account and I couldn’t see anything from Cornell,” Anderson said.

Hulbert agreed with Anderson’s method of sorting her e-mails.

“I use MSN also. I linked [Cmail] to my other account but I get all my Cornell mail from it. The nice thing about Cmail is I can keep all my family stuff separate. I use the MSN one more, but I like the separation.”

Yet just over half the University still hasn’t switched. Alex Belbin ’12 doesn’t see the need to change a good thing.

“I didn’t know it existed,” Belbin said. “What I use works fine, so why change it? You get 10 e-mails a day. You’ve got to delete nine of them. I guess I didn’t see it.”

CIT in the next few months will target those students that have not yet switched with advertising campaigns and updated information. They hope to finish the process by the end of June.