The University had offered faculty, staff, and students two platforms for communication and collaboration – Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Both service frameworks were available to everyone at UConn, with the exception of email and calendaring. For technical reasons, student email was hosted on Google (Gmail) and faculty and staff on Microsoft 365 (Outlook). Community preferences and certain security and management considerations had resulted in students primarily using Google apps to create and store files, while employees had been more strongly associated with Microsoft 365.
Having our community on two different platforms caused problems. Files and the technology are largely incompatible, which impeded file sharing, collaboration, and full use of features. People often switched back and forth between the two, disparate systems. The university supported both, despite the challenges, because of those preferences and because Google historically offered educational institutions free and unlimited storage. This changed in 2022 when Google unilaterally changed their terms and conditions. The institutional relationship is now effectively no better than a personal relationship. It is no longer free, and the expense scales with usage. For a large university with substantial storage needs, the cost is significant, and hard caps/quotas are necessary. Further, Google expenses are duplicative of the university's existing and ongoing enterprise relationship with Microsoft.
After carefully considering cost, security, capabilities, and complexity, we made the difficult decision to unify UConn onto a single feature rich platform by phasing out Google and transitioning students to Microsoft 365.
For additional information and a detailed timeline for the transition, visit: its.uconn.edu/google-to-microsoft-365-transition