Makayla Silva
The current e-mail system for students—the MySCSU-iPlanet e-mail system—is quite limited in terms of space and capabilities, according to Wendy Chang, chief information officer.
“First of all, it only provides students with 100 megabytes of storage in the mailbox,” she said. “Second of all, it doesn’t have integrated calendars, it doesn’t support a sync with your mobile device, it doesn’t have an add and drop feature—the interface is not as flexible.”
Owls is a Web version of Microsoft Outlook, which will provide students with 100 times more storage than the previous system, according to Chang.
SCSU students will have six months to migrate from the MySCSU system to the new Owls email between April 1 and September 30, according to Chang.
“Your only e-mail address as of Oct. 1 that will work,” she said, “will be @owls.southernct.edu.”
Starting April 1, students should log into the new e-mail system to activate the new e-mail address and auto-forward the e-mails sent to MySCSU to Owls.
“Both addresses will coexist between April 1 and September 30,” Chang said, “after that only Owls.”
The new e-mail system has an add and drop feature, video clip and photo capabilities, additional server space through Office Live for Microsoft Word documents, Power Point and Excel files to avoid using a travel drive, according to Chang.
“You don’t have to worry about space,” she said.
As a part of cost-savings initiatives—because it takes an enormous amount of server space to store e-mails—Southern was able to have a much less expensive student e-mail system by having it hosted in the Microsoft product called live.edu, according to Ronald Herron, vice president of student and university affairs.
“Going to the live.edu product gave us the ability to service our students with greater features inside e-mail than we could ever do,” he said.
Students can forward their mail to another service provider—like Yahoo!, Gmail or Hotmail—through the new Owls e-mail system, according to Herron.
“Students will be able, within Owls, to go inside and to redirect mail sent to that address, by the university, to a third party provider,” he said.
Students are required, when they migrate to live.edu, to direct mail to be forwarded to the third party account, by selecting auto-forward and filling out the appropriate information, according to Herron.
“It is a more powerful tech-friendly environment that many students are using and has the effect of freeing up our server space for educational purposes rather than communication purposes,” he said.
Herron said it will be necessary, if a student auto-forwards their e-mails to a third party, to realize when responding to an e-mail sent, the reply will come from the student’s personal e-mail.
“If you are trying to transact any business with the university, you will not be able to do that from an auto-forwarded account,” he said. “I have no way to authenticate that you are funnygirl622@gmail.com when I wrote you under your Southern name and you’ve popped it onto some funky-named account.”
There will be negative consequences for students who have not yet migrated as of Oct. 1 because they will not receive any e-mails from the university, according to Herron.
Frank Greco, a junior business major, said he thinks the new e-mail system will be beneficial for his fraternity.
“Considering I am in a fraternity, Beta Mu Sigma, it’s a plus for sending out large-scale posters for charity events like the Hip Hop for Haiti that we are organizing,” he said. “Instead of sitting down at a meeting we can send everything out via electronic mail—it saves a lot of time and saves a lot resources.”
Further instructions, according to Chang, regarding the migration from the MySCSU e-mail system to live.edu will be sent to students starting April 1. Herron and Chang both said it is imperative for students to activate their new accounts as soon as possible after April 1.
“Outlook is the best e-mail system right now on the market,” Chang said, “so what you (Southern) are having is the best.”
