Category: Google Calendar

Last week the second group of early adopters moved to Gmail and Google Calendar. There will be a 3rd group of early adopters making the move on May 26th, and after that we’ll begin regular adoption by campus group: June 9th for faculty and departmental assistants, June 23rd for students, and July 7th for all remaining staff.

Between now and July 7th,  the campus will be divided between people who use Zimbra and people who use Google Calendar. During this time, if you are someone who invites people to meetings using calendar event invitations you will notice a couple of oddities. This week’s Tip of the Week addresses these temporary calendaring issues, all of which will resolve on July 7th when the final group of people move to Google Calendar.

Until July 7th, Carleton will be divided between people who use Zimbra and people who use Gmail and Google Calendar. Email will flow seamlessly during this time, but there will be some calendar oddities until everyone has transitioned to Google.

This week’s Tip of the Week: How to manage the two main calendaring artifacts of the campus’ staggered transition process from now until July 7th. In this post:

1. How to search Google Calendars if you’re on Zimbra
2. How to search Zimbra calendars if you’re on Google
3. How to modify calendar events if some people are on Zimbra and some are on Google.

This week, around 20 people have submitted requests to have their usernames lengthened to current standards. If you would like to join these ranks, here’s how to submit your request. The deadline is May 30th!

Thursday evening, our second group of Early Adopters made the move to Gmail and Google Calendar. This second group includes SERC and Summer Academic Programs staff as well as some others. If you’re in this group, we recommend coming to a training session!

Next week, on May 17th at 11am, File Management Stewards for administrative departments can join in training provided by Dropbox. If you are a File Management Steward and would like to join, you can either come to CMC 110 or join the video call from anywhere with an internet connection. Details are here. 

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…

A few weeks ago, Carleton had its annual Employee Recognition Lunch.  To me, that is one of the events that makes Carleton special. It is a unique opportunity to celebrate the broad and varied group of people who are needed in order to provide this wonderful, residential educational experience for our students.  Believe it or not, that event got me thinking about email and files and what it means to be a good communicator in 2016… 

Welcome to the weekly blog posts by the project team! Our plan is to post these small updates every week so that you can keep up with what we’re up to and what we’re heading toward in the Gmail and Dropbox transition project.

In this brief update you’ll find a Project Update, a Tip of the Week, and What to Expect in the Next Week.

Thanks to the efforts of more than 100 faculty, staff and students, who spent nearly 500 hours evaluating two possible email and calendaring products, the Tuesday Group and I were able to make a well-informed choice of how to replace Zimbra. We are pleased to share that the campus will be moving to Google Apps for Education for email & calendaring and Dropbox for cloud storage. …