By Torenzo Richardson
MISSISSIPPI STATE, Miss. (Take 30 News)---When MSU students and staff log into their email later this month, it will look a little different. On February 26th, Mississippi State is switching from Bully Mail to Outlook in hopes to make it better for teachers and students accessing their emails.
Director of MSU Information Technology Infrastructure, Gerhard Lehnerer, said one of the benefits of the switch is to have students using the same email that many professionals use.
"The next, perhaps logical step is to get the students and employees in the same environment, um it has a couple of advantages from our prospective, first being Microsoft has come out with teams, and that allows the students and employees to do collaboration,” Lehnerer said.
The vote to switch the email systems over on February 26 was led and pushed forward by the student association. Student association members said they heard logical reasoning by the I.T. Department on why it’s beneficial.
"ITS administration approached us about the possibility of switching over to outlook but they were very upfront from the very beginning that if it wasn’t something that we wanted and we supported they wouldn’t have made the switch, so then we started asking what will that mean and what if benefits were the cons so to start the pros everybody will be in the global access list which means rather than having to type Jake Manning in the directory to look at my net id you’ll simply be able to type in Jake Manning and it'll pull up my account and you can send emails to people", Jake Manning, President of Student Association, said.
Currently, students have Bully Mail, which separates their emails from faculty, but with the switch students and teachers will be on one system, and some students are not happy with the switch.
"I don’t really like the switch from Google to Outlook because if it isn’t broke don’t fix it. I know a lot of departments and people on campus use Google Docs, the Googles Slides, a lot of my extra curriculum programs and my job, all of our files that we use for these things are Google Docs, Google Slides, just the whole Google drive so if were switching from Google to Outlook we won’t have access to valuable information", MSU Senior Symone Davis said.
With this switch professors and students will be able to work together through Microsoft apps such as teams and the outlook calendar, which will allow students to see if professors are currently available or easily check their office hours.