Why Google Apps?

After careful consideration, Casper College has decided to migrate all faculty and staff email accounts to Gmail. Gmail is part of Google Apps for Education, a common platform for all students, faculty, and staff to collaborate. Google will provide large capacity email and calendars, along with Docs, Sites, and Chat to facilitate pedagogy and teamwork. Many of your initial questions may be addressed with the following blog post.

Moving to Google Apps for Education: A Rationale for moving to Google Apps for Education at Casper College

What is Google Apps?

Google Apps is a suite of web-based messaging and collaboration applications that Google hosts on their own servers. Google provides these applications as a "service," rather than as software to download and install. To access these applications, you simply use a web browser on a computer that's connected to the Internet.

Why did you choose Google Apps?

Some of the benefits Google Apps can offer include:

• • Lower infrastructure costs -- All your email will be stored securely on Google's servers, so we'll no longer need to maintain email servers on-site

  • Ability to consolidate our platforms -- We can eliminate redundancy by moving all of our email and calendar platforms to Google Apps

  • Lower support costs -- Because Google hosts the email and calendar services, there's no more email client software to maintain on your computer

  • Innovative solutions -- We can leverage the ongoing creative and technical solutions of the Google Apps platform to provide employees with powerful, easy-to-use tools for getting their work done

  • Highly scalable environment -- With Google Apps, our email capacity will grow automatically as our College grows, and we'll avoid the complexity of internal systems

  • Access to services from anywhere, anytime -- A key benefit of the Google-hosted solution is that we can access email, contacts, and calendar from any computer or mobile device with an Internet connection, anywhere in the world

  • More collaboration features -- With Google's next-generation applications, we can collaborate with colleagues, customers, and partners more easily and efficiently than ever before

• Instant messaging -- Because Google Apps includes Google Talk, we can continue an instant messaging system for the College.

What exactly does Google Apps include?

Your new Google Apps account will include the following services:

What are the key benefits?

• • Lots of storage -- You get a full 25 GB of online storage for your email so you can archive all of your email online. You'll no longer need to worry about deleting messages or saving them in offline folders.

  • Enhanced message organization and retrieval -- With Google Mail, you'll spend less time managing folders and searching for messages. For example, you can add one or more tags, or "labels," to your messages to organize and store them more efficiently. And with the Google-powered search feature, you can find any message quickly and easily, whether it's in your Inbox or stored in your message archive.

  • Easier calendar sharing -- Google Calendar lets you and your team members quickly and easily share your calendars with each other and specify the details you want to show. Calendar sharing is a great way for you and your coworkers to keep each other informed about your schedules. Now it's easier than ever to find out if someone is in a meeting, on a business trip, or on vacation.

  • Integrated chat -- With the Google Talk instant messaging application, you can communicate instantly with your coworkers right from the Email interface. In addition, all your chats are automatically saved in your Email application, so you can always retrieve important information.

  • Real-time collaboration -- Using Google Docs, you can create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and you and your team members can view and edit them at the same time. You can still use your Office products as needed, but now you'll have more options for storing and collaborating on your documents.

  • Easy-to-build team web sites -- With Google Sites, your team has the ability to quickly publish a robust internal web site on which to gather all sorts of shared information, such as documents, spreadsheets, presentations, files, and videos. You can even embed Google calendars and other gadgets on your site!

  • Powerful video sharing -- Using Google Video for business, you can easily share videos with your team or throughout the College for a whole new level of communication and collaboration.