The coming year will bring a historic change in Cornell's e-mail system, as the university begins to phase out the familiar postoffice system operated by Cornell Information Technologies (CIT). Faculty and staff e-mail will move to the Microsoft Exchange system, and student e-mail is expected to be managed through Google and Microsoft. CIT calls the project "Ensemble."

Although contracts have not been finalized, plans call for current students to have the option during the spring semester of moving their e-mail service to either Google Apps for Education or Microsoft Live@edu with Exchange Labs. Starting in the fall of 2009, new undergraduate and graduate students will receive accounts on both services and choose which one to use as their primary e-mail service. All students will have access to other features provided by both services, which include calendaring, such productivity tools as online word processing and spreadsheets, and collaboration tools to work together on shared documents.

Students would still use their Cornell NetID and e-mail address and would log in to Cornell-branded Google Apps or Microsoft Live accounts via a Cornell authentication system.

The exact timing for the change in student services is pending, according to Greg Menzenski, project manager in CIT. "Our expectation is that most students will migrate when given the opportunity," he said. Surveys show that most students favor the change.

Faculty and staff will move to the Microsoft Exchange service by units, beginning in September 2009. Microsoft Exchange provides e-mail, calendar, task list and address book services. It will replace Oracle Calendar as the campuswide calendar system. The recommended software to use both e-mail and calendar services will be Outlook for Windows and Entourage for Macintosh, and all services will be accessible via the Web.

"If all you need is e-mail, you can use any client software that supports standard e-mail protocols," said Christopher Lyons, senior project manager for CIT. Apple Mail and Thunderbird will be supported by CIT, he said. Although Eudora will continue to work, it is no longer supported by the vendor, so CIT will also be discontinuing support, and faculty and staff will be on their own in setting it up to work with Microsoft Exchange.

The complete changeover is expected to take about two years.

These plans have grown out of the work of two task forces created in 2007 by Polley McClure, vice president for information technologies, to explore "personal productivity services" and whether existing systems could keep up with new technologies. The plans were in the works long before the widespread e-mail outage that struck campus in June 2008.

On the faculty and staff side, McClure noted in her charge to the Task Force for Personal Productivity that several units on campus had set up their own Exchange servers, and that this could lead to fragmentation and additional expense in trying to keep everyone's calendars working together. Another major factor, she said, is the proliferation of handheld devices and the desire of faculty and staff to maintain synchronization between their handhelds and perhaps multiple laptops and desktops. Since 2007, about 500 people in Cornell administration and Alumni Affairs and Development have been using Exchange in a pilot project for supporting BlackBerry and iPhone devices and have reported general satisfaction.

On the student side, outsourcing e-mail to free services obviously saves money for Cornell, but the primary motivation is to provide a higher level of service, CIT's Menzenski said. "Students are coming in with gmail, doing things with it we haven't even thought of," he explained. "We can't match the functionality these guys are delivering."

Along with the additional online applications, the services would provide each student with much more online storage space -- 6.5 GB on Google and 10 GB on Microsoft -- more than 20 times the 300 MB now provided by Cornell. A further advantage, Menzenski said, is continuity after graduation: Alumni are expected to be able to keep their Google or Microsoft accounts, with their cornell.edu addresses. Current Cornell e-mail service stops six months after graduation, although graduates may keep their addresses and have the mail forwarded to some other service.

The Task Force for Student Personal Productivity Services, comprising seven students and eight faculty and staff, concluded that of all vendors available, only Google and Microsoft offered the level of service Cornell needs. After reviewing proposals from the vendors, the task force decided to offer both, creating some healthy competition and ensuring that services would continue if one company decided to leave the field. The arrangement also gives the university a choice if one vendor happens to adopt "unacceptable policies or practices" in the future.

Since the services are free, what's in it for the vendors? After a student graduates, the services will begin to display ads. "They consider Cornell eyeballs especially valuable," Lyons said.

More information about these initiatives is available at http://www.cit.cornell.edu/ensemble.