Starting Feb. 6, students will find their GroupWise email largely irrelevant as CMU rolls out its new emailing and scheduling software provided by Microsoft, a move that CMU’s Director of Computing and Network Systems Mike Kansgen says was long overdue.

“GroupWise has been around for a number of years now, and when students leave Colorado Mesa they don’t see a lot of GroupWise out in the work environment,” Kansgen said. “What they will find is Microsoft all over the place. So we felt that making this move not only improves the capability of the students while they’re here, but they’ll be able to drop right into the workforce.”

The shift will happen gradually through the spring and summer terms before being fully completed by the start of the fall semester. Students can expect to see the new option for Microsoft Outlook on their MAVzone login page below the existing GroupWise option.

Groupwise will still be accessible, but all new emails will be received through Outlook. Past and saved emails will still exist within the Groupwise server to give students time to get used to the transition and relocate any existing files into the new Microsoft Office 365 software for when GroupWise is no longer available after spring break.

The move follows the recent trend of hundreds of universities across the nation that have shifted from their own in-house emailing systems to outsourcing to companies like Google and Microsoft. According to a 2012 Tech Crunch article, 66 of the top 100 universities were dependent on Gmail alone, a system that Kansgen said CMU almost decided to go with.

“Honestly, we took a serious look at Gmail, and we felt that after we had done the research and talked to other universities that Microsoft’s privacy and security was going to give us the better bet,” Kansgen said.

This was largely due to the upcoming need for the university to have a completely secure system to uphold the privacy standards of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, when additional clinical studies programs are added to CMU. The decision was in concern particularly with the confidentiality provisions of the Patient Safety Rule, which protect identifiable information being used to analyze patient safety events and improve patient safety, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Students will not have to worry about changing anything as their email addresses and passwords will remain the same. A Getting Started Guide will be launched on MAVzone on Feb. 6 as well to help explain the new emailing system and overview the changes that include an increase in email storage from 50 megabytes to 50 gigabytes (an increase over 1,000 percent), document creation and editing being available online directly through the Office 365 MAVzone link and an additional 25 GB being provided in SkyDrive.

jdredmon@mavs.coloradomesa.edu