More than 113,000 faculty, staff and students now can access Google tools with their UMICH account to collaborate with peers, easily share and edit documents, and replace travel time with work time through video chats and Google hangouts.
Since faculty and staff members were given accounts, more than 25,000, or one in four, have signed in to Google. The set-up process, which took place over a five-day period leading up to March 5, had a 99.81 percent success rate, meaning that out of 113,293 UMICH accounts, only 216 had errors that needed correcting. (The full report is in the Updates & Announcements section of the M+Google project site: sites.google.com/a/umich.edu/going-google/tech-updates.)
“I am really excited about the Google platform,” says Laura Patterson, associate vice president and chief information officer. “And actually, I don’t think we have even started to imagine all the things that are going to come from it.”
Using a UMICH account, faculty, staff and sponsored affiliates now can access all of the Google collaboration tools except email and calendar, which they will get in phases over the summer. For a list of Go-Live dates, go to tinyurl.com/6qhqp86. Students, retirees, U-M Online subscribers, and December 2011 graduates received all of the Google tools and were provided with access to an online tool to help them move their IMAP email and webmail contacts into Google. As of March 12, approximately 5,300 students had moved their email to the new system.
While the ongoing conversion to Google email and calendar is a key element of the U-M-Google partnership, several other IT process improvements stemming from that partnership already are taking hold.
Patterson talked with The University Record about all the possibilities of Google in the first part of a series on the future of information technology at U-M.
Record: Ann Arbor students, faculty, and staff just got access to Google Apps, and units will be moving to Google email and calendar over the next several months. How do you expect this to change how we work, teach, and learn?
Patterson: There is a very strong focus on email and calendar, and that’s perfectly understandable. We spend so much time there, and it has such an impact on productivity that I understand why everyone is concerned about the move to Google email and calendar. But going to Google really is not about just email and calendar. It’s really about a collaboration platform.
When we first go to Google, it will be frustrating to people, because many will be living in Google but still thinking in their old email or calendar system, particularly the large percentage of campus that’s used to Microsoft. And so it’s a big adjustment, because Google was developed in the cloud environment, and developed by a company whose focus is on managing information, and so they very much built their platform around search and information management rather than around the use of folders in hierarchy. Conceptually it’s very different from the outset. But the way that it changes how we work and how we interact with each other, I think in as short period of time as a few months, it’s going to be very dramatic.
Record: How will these changes play out?
Patterson: Let me give a couple of specific examples. I know students and many faculty already collaborate in Google. But the traditional way of collaborating is that if I and a couple of colleagues were going to produce an article in The University Record, I might start the article and send it to you as an email attachment. Then you would edit it, probably using Track Changes, and the other people working with us would edit it. All of that would come back to me as attachments in email that I would try to combine, figure out how they all fit together, and send it back out to you. In the Google environment, you start with a document that everyone can go into and edit at the same time, and you can watch each other’s edits. You can comment on each other’s edits. You can chat while you are editing. And the same goes for spreadsheets, presentations and documents. This real-time editing dramatically decreases the amount of time that it takes to produce the document. It’s amazing.
Record: What other uses are there for Google?
Patterson: The other thing that I am really excited to introduce to campus is Google+ and the use of Hangout. Google+ is Google’s social networking tool, but it is designed for the enterprise. I think that the opportunities here are endless. A faculty member who has a particular research interest will be able to find other faculty at the University of Michigan who might be thinking about the same or similar research. And they can start an online dialogue and bring graduate students into it and bring undergraduate students into it. The possibilities for the way we use Google+ and Circles are very exciting.
On top of that, Google offers Web Video Conferencing. What’s really cool is the way it is integrated into the calendar and email, and it’s as simple as a click on a link. And rather than exchanging email, you and I can be talking real-time through our computers, and while we are talking, I can put up the document that I am working on and we can start editing it. It’s an exciting platform.
Record: What is the end goal?
Patterson: The impact of this is we will be more productive. We will create things faster than we currently do. There will be less travel time wasted driving around campus and driving around parking structures trying to find a parking place, because we can have real-time meetings online, interacting, working on a document real-time. It’s really going to be an exciting change in a platform that the university will grow into. It will just go places that we can’t even envision right now.
