By Torenzo Richardson
STARKVILLE, Miss. (Take 30 News)-- Over the last couple of weeks, Mississippi State University’s ITS department has been monitoring the cyber behavior of students as they adjust to the new email switch.
ITS department head Lehnerer Gerhard said the transition is going well.
"Well from the IT perspective we're glad it's done. We've spent a lot of hours in the planning process going through the populations to make sure we got everyone moves because for us when a student leaves they aren't guaranteed to keep email for life," Gerhard said.
Gerhard said this was not an easy task, as students started a petition after learning about this change. He said there were a lot of concern and frustration.
"There was a petition, I think it had about 12 to 1,500 signatures no we want to stay with Gmail. We told people with concerns to go talk to the SA president and a lot go them did and after having the discussion there was a lot of misinformation about ‘oh we are going to lose our email address’ and one of the students said ‘hey I just signed up for all these services using this email address and now you’re going to change it,’ no there was no changing your email address," Gerhard said.
The goal for the new outlook email was putting students and teachers under the same email system to allow the communication process to be easier, more wide range, and using google and Microsoft 1 Drive together for more space.