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Throughout this quarter of the year, students increasingly transitioned from the e-mail service U-mail to Microsoft Office 365. This came after the Associated Students group unanimously passed a mandate to initiate the adoption of the robust collaboration platform earlier this year. The move will deliver better efficiency and organization tools to students.

Office 365 is an online service that retains 25 gigabytes of space for e-mails, calendars, instant messaging, Office Web Applications and file sharing services, which is a whole lot greater than U-Mail’s 200 megabyte limit.

However, according to UCSB Information and Technology Service Manager of Identity and E-mail Services, Matthew Dunham, expectations of great change after the server swap will only lead to frustration. He says that the changes will largely be “transparent”, with the main parts visible to users like mail addresses remaining unchanged and the service name being retained as U-Mail. The only difference is that the service servers will no longer reside within Phelps Hall but will instead be out there on the Internet.

The new server enables students to much more effectively monitor all their messages. Expressing his opinion about the server switch, Jonathan Abboud, RHA president who is also a third-year political science major, added, “I’m pretty happy that we finally encouraged the university to upgrade the e-mail system and that students and administration worked together to change it.”

With this cloud-based solution offering all the necessary communications between students, staff and faculty members, there is definitely going to be increased and enhanced support for smartphones among other opportunities of managing address books entries.

Upon completion of the transition, all that remains on the U-mail main page is an e-mail link to the new e-mail accounts. Interested users can still log back into their U-mail accounts, although Office 365 will be the default UCSB mailing server going forward.