Leah Knibbe, University of Idaho senior, uses her Vandal email account daily to communicate with the students she tutors.
“I have found Outlook to be incredibly hard to use,” Knibbe said. “It’s incredibly difficult in this program to email multiple people. Hotmail has memorized my email contacts for me and would automatically type in the names”
The University of Idaho Information Technology Services announced in November that students Windows Live email accounts would all be transferred to the Outlook Live system.
Knibbe said the Outlook Live system’s contact book is not a good replacement.
“There is no option to copy and paste your address list, so sending a mass email out to my students can take 20 minutes,” Knibbe said.
Outlook opens the top email as the home page, which Knibbe said also bothered her.
“I don’t want it choosing my email to open, and then that first email is listed as read,” Knibbe said. “And if it is not unread I will forget about it. The only solution I found was to set it to not automatically mark anything as read.”
The Vandal Mail change process began in October when Microsoft Corp. informed ITS that they were transferring all university accounts to Outlook, said Chuck Lanham, ITS senior director of enterprise applications.
“If we hadn’t started the migration process prior to December, they were going to move us regardless,” Lanham said. “And so we were not pleased with this.”
Lanham said they had tried to contact Microsoft in April 2011 for migration tools to smoothly transfer the accounts during the summer.
“The only (reason) I’ve heard is it had to do with the way they provision accounts on Hotmail, but really makes no sense to me as to why that would be a reason,” Lanham said. “We haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer.”
Lanham said ITS sent its transfer timetable to admissions, the dean’s office and ASUI for input, but they did not hear back from any of the offices.
“We basically had from mid October until Dec. 31 to make this change,” Lanham said. “If we didn’t start the process on our time line, Microsoft was going to start it for us. And that undoubtedly would have happened either during finals week or during Christmas break.”
When students and faculty activated their new Outlook accounts, they had to read and electronically accept a waiver saying the organization providing the account has full access to all account activity.
Patrick Olsen, a UI gradate student in geography, said the message concerned him, so he contacted ITS.
“The wording on that was just so vague, that it kind of raised my privacy (concerns) and it made me wonder, ‘What is it actually that I’m signing here,'” Olsen said. “And what is it that I’m signing away, because the way it’s worded, legally, it allows whatever the domain administrator to do essentially anything to your account.”
Lanham said the agreement between students and the university has not changed, but the pop-up window is new to Outlook.
“The university does not read student emails. The university does not have access to student email,” Lanham said. “However, in the event that something was needed, we would work with the student to gain access or in the event the student wasn’t available to work with, the university could change the student’s password to gain access. … Such as a student passing away.”
Lanham said he is not aware of any instances in which the university has had to access student emails.
Student response to the new system have been generally negative, Lanham said.
“With that said, students didn’t like the change four-and-a-half years ago when we moved to this platform,” Lanham said. “Students are saying ‘this is harder to navigate.’ ‘It’s different.’ ‘Printing is a little bit different.'”
Lanham said most of the student comments are about the differences and the bad timing of the change.
“I hope they understand that doing it now, before finals is better than doing it during finals, which is the only alternative,” Lanham said. “ITS wanted to do this on a completely different time table that would have been less intrusive to the students, so I wish that would’ve happened.”