On August 16, students stopped receiving emails in their Gmail accounts. No, financial services did not decide to stop notifying them about their tuition payments, nor did their professors forget about them being in their classes the next semester. Instead, Calvin student email accounts switched to Microsoft Office 365. Students now have access to Microsoft Office Online as well as all Google services except for email.

“The biggest push [for the switch] was because we wanted a more secure and more collaborative environment,” said Michael Mandeville, head of student technology services and one of the facilitators of the switch. Faculty and staff have been using Office 365 for three or four years, during which many reported difficulties with student collaboration due to the different programs. With this move to Office 365, everyone is on the same platform and can easily share and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

On the issue of security, in order to keep up with the requirements of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Calvin must store all data on their own servers, and for HIPAA, it has to be on U.S. soil.  

“Microsoft is very transparent about where those [files] are stored,” Mandeville said. “Office 365 is a viable, cloud-storage, HIPAA protected location. That level of security with cloud storage and being accessible from mobile devices everywhere is very, very difficult to find.”  But Calvin has found it.

Mandeville has received a variety of feedback from students on the subject: “We tried very hard to make it easy for students, but I understand it’s an inconvenience; it’s a change,” he said. “We would have loved to have made it optional for seniors, but from a technical perspective, it was impossible.”

Many students, such as junior Mark Peless, cited their main issue with the switch as the timing:

“At first I was upset to have to move over to a whole new system. As a student with a busy life, change like that can really throw you off rhythm,” he said, “The switch was a lot simpler than I expected, however, and after using Outlook for a few weeks now, I’m beginning to enjoy and explore all of the features it has to offer. I think once people get used to it they will begin to see the reason why the switch was not only smart, but necessary.”

Microsoft Office 365 offers the same applications as Google: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and many others. Online documents can be saved to OneDrive, the Microsoft equivalent of the Google Drive, for sharing and multi-user access.

Students will still be able to access their Google accounts, but the Gmail portion of them will be disabled on November 15 of this year. Mandeville suggests that if accessing emails from the Gmail account is necessary, the best way would be to save them to a personal Google account.