St. Edward’s University has decided to say goodbye Zimbra and hello Google.

President George E. Martin announced Oct. 5 that the university will transition to Google applications, leaving the university’s current application, Zimbra, behind. The change is expected to be implemented campus wide in fall of 2017.

The decision to transition to Google Apps was made by the Office of Information Technology (OIT) after consulting with different members across the university, said Vice President for Information Technology David Waldron.

“We have for some time been aware of great interest within the university community for transitioning to Google Apps,” Waldron said. “This transition was not undertaken earlier because the Office of Information Technology was necessarily focused on other complex projects including the implementation of a new administrative software suite and the transition to Canvas.”

The campus transition will be in three phases, said Sarah Sharif, project manager and OIT communications strategist. Phase I is already underway.

Phase I is the “pilot migration,” or researching and documenting how to move all information currently in a Zimbra account to Gmail.

“It’s making sure that if we do this, we’re going to do it correctly,” Sharif said. “The worst thing is you open up your email and someone else has your calendar or you no longer have [access to an old syllabus] in your email chain.”

A third party vendor is being used to help with the transition and will help with testing within OIT. Phase II is slated to begin next semester with “early adopters.” Those selected will be used to find any bugs in the process.   

“You’re walking into something that is still unstable,” Sharif said. “Something that is going to break, guaranteed, and you have to be comfortable with losing your calendar, maybe your contacts … that stuff always happens with any kind of data transfer.”

Phase III is the “complete transition,” scheduled to be completed for the fall of 2017. All staff, faculty and student emails and calendars will be transferred out of Zimbra. 

OIT is ready for the migration, which Sharif called a “win-win.”

Some applications coming include Google Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, Gmail and Calendar.

OIT has decided to leave Zimbra now and not in the past for various reasons. One of them being a number of other projects going on in the past, keeping the office busy with other work.

Google Fiber is still being discussed and Sharif could not comment on whether or not it would be coming to St. Edward’s campus.

“IT [should] step up our support and everything around this [Google transition] because I think a lot of people are excited about this,” Sharif said. “And they should be.”