When senior Kevin Milne checked his school e-mail Monday evening, he read the campus-wide message about the Google Applications upgrade and thought, "Oh OK, that just means I get new features." But when he went to click on this personal Gmail account, open in another tab, he had been signed out.
"I realized I couldn't keep them open at the same time," he said. "I looked up online how to switch between the two and fixed it right away."
Users with a DePauw e-mail account received notification of application upgrades Feb. 24, and the transition began Monday at 5 p.m. When the university switched its e-mail domain to Google at the end of spring 2010, the only features available included Google sites, Google documents, Google calendar as well as contact and group management abilities. With the upgrade, users can access and use more than 40 applications with their depauw.edu account.
Carol Smith, chief information officer, said Google told the university a few months ago that they planned to upgrade the education suite — the service to which DePauw subscribes. With the upgrades available, the university chose to transition this week and make the accounts more versatile so users might consolidate or otherwise streamline their online activities.
All the applications are optional features, and the upgrade will not affect the basic functions of e-mail.
"It really won't impact people," Smith said. "They won't notice."
"The advantage of that is it allows you to collaborate more easily with DePauw people," Smith said, noting that people can give one form of contact, as opposed to using personal e-mails to create school-related photo-sharing, blogging and book-searching through applications like Picasa, Blogger and Google Books.
But besides the welcome screen everyone will encounter when his or her account transitions, those with multiple Google accounts will face the same obstacle Milne experienced.
"It's really obnoxious — you still have to switch between the two accounts. It's a lot easier if they're two separate tabs," Milne said. "I have to click on ‘switch accounts.' If I'm not signed in, I have to do that, and then switch between the two. … It has to be in the same window and that's kind of annoying."
To enable account switching, users must go to their account settings (the option is available in the top-right of the e-mail home page in a menu that drops down from a gear-shaped icon). From that point, users may turn on the "multiple sign-in" function.
DePauw's domain includes more than 3,000 accounts, and Smith said she does not know how long the transition will take.
"This is one of the interesting side-effects of having an outsourced domain," Smith said.
So far, Smith said they haven't received much response to the update notifications the Help Desk has sent via e-mail.
"We've been sending messages, but people are busy," she said.
Anyone with questions about the upgrade can call or visit the Help Desk or e-mail helpdesk@depauw.edu.