The first Early Adopter group, consisting of 52 faculty, staff, and students, migrated to Gmail on April 14th, and has been providing us with extremely helpful feedback about our communication, training, and process. Although trying to plan meetings across two calendaring systems has been vexing, for the most part the transition has been smooth and uneventful. We have updated our process and will be migrating a second Early Adopter group on May 12th to ensure that we are ready for the faculty migration on June 9th.
Migration
The major migration milestone dates are:
- Faculty and academic Admin Assistants migration – Thursday, June 9th
- Returning students migration – Thursday, June 23th
- Staff, emeriti, and special accounts migration – Thursday, July 7th
If you would like to switch from your default date to one of the other two, please contact the ITS Helpdesk at x5999 or via email at helpdesk@carleton.edu. Requests to change dates must be made before Wednesday, May 11th.
The project website, located at http://apps.carleton.edu/recs, has extensive information about the timeline, the process, and training options. All the emails we will send you prior to your migration are also available for your reference, on the Communications page: http://apps.carleton.edu/recs/comm/. A number of different training options are available on the training page, including both self-paced video training and instructor-led training: https://apps.carleton.edu/recs/training/google-training/.
There are a several steps we recommend you complete before your migration date to make the process go more smoothly. They include some cleanup of your mailbox, checking some information that won’t copy from Zimbra to Gmail to allow you to easily recreate it, and evaluating messages that are too large for Gmail to accept to determine if they are still needed. Information on how to clean up your email, and information on what settings to check before the migration, are available on the project website. Reminder emails will also be sent to you four weeks before your migration date.
Will it be perfect?
We have found in our testing and from our early adopters that nearly every account has a few messages that do not successfully copy to Gmail. Most of those messages were marketing messages (spam) with pretty severe formatting problems, like multiple “From:” addresses, or messages that contained viruses. The error rate for this group was around 0.01%, with the number of errors per account ranging from zero to around 250; most people who had errors had fewer than 20. When all your mail has copied from Zimbra to Gmail, we will send you a report listing any messages that failed to copy, including for each one the sender, the date sent, the subject line, and about 20 lines of text from the message to help you determine if the contents of the message were important. The Helpdesk will be able to help you retrieve any messages you need that fail to copy.
If you have questions or concerns that are not addressed on the project website, please don’t hesitate to contact Austin Robinson-Coolidge (arobinso@carleton.edu, x5999) or Julie Anderson (janderso@carleton.edu, x6824).