UVa Students Get a Jump On Work 2.0
In an almost universally acclaimed decision, the University of Virginia will begin out-sourcing its student email to Google and Microsoft later this semester. Along with email, students will be introduced to a whole new suite of document sharing, calendaring, and instant messaging applications in Gmail and Windows Live. And the icing on the cake? Students can now keep their UVa email account for life, and upon leaving the University, their messages and folders will be preserved (current alumni can also take advantage of this opportunity). Sweet!
The announcement is a welcome—if not jarring—departure from the staid, old ways of doing things at UVa. And, though I am loathed to admit it, I was one of those initially jarred by the offering of, not one, but two new email choices. How could we introduce another student option and additional support complexity when the University already had two somewhat disparate choices (Central Mail System and MS Exchange)? I was particularly concerned about the potential incompatibilities of the document applications (i.e., will Google’s spreadsheet work with Microsoft’s spreadsheet?). Yeah, I was thinking with my lizard brain.
In beTech-land, we already recognize that the world is shifting from a centrally-managed, closed-source working/learning environment to a distributed, open-source, API environment. Information is the application and the tool we use to access it is becoming increasingly irrelevant. A recent Scoble post reinforces the obvious…
These new services let you work with people in a whole new way. No more emailing around Word Docs or Spreadsheets or PowerPoints. Instead you pass around a URL, and work there.
Duh. This is what Work 2.0 looks like. The students, if they haven’t already, will quickly master these new applications as readily as Facebook and MySpace. Rather than coddle students with archaic, committee-conceived, and centrally-managed dinosaurs, the University’s primary task is to provide competitive tools to open worlds of information and insight. All the rest can and will be worked out in due time. For now, UVa students have an unprecedented opportunity to show the rest of us how it’s done.
What if I am an alum and currently use the forwarding service (alumni.virginia.edu) — any idea how that works? I couldn’t find anything on the link you provided. TIA
Stormy: Sorry, I have no idea how it works or how it might change. I did a bit of checking around and couldn’t locate a suitable answer, so you may have to go to the source, the oracle, the big kahuna. And if on your journey you find an answer, please let us know what you find. –thanks!
Stormy: I have an update from the ITC oracle on this issue:
It’s not much, but I hope that’s more helpful.
Thanks. We’ll see how it turns out.