Macquarie Uni drops Gmail for Office 365

Macquarie University has revealed plans to migrate all staff email and calendars from Google’s Gmail to Microsoft’s Office 365 by the end of the year.

The university will deploy Office 365 tools including Outlook, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business and Office 2013. It has appointed Dell, Synergy and SMS to aid in the transition to the new service.

In a notice announcing the change, Macquarie University CIO Dr Mary Davies said the decision was motivated by data security concerns, following the decision by Google to migrate the university’s stored data from Europe to the US.

As a result of the decision, the company initiated a search for alternative options and settled on Office 365 in part because it has services that are hosted in Australian data centres.

Local hosting promises to address the university’s security and data privacy concerns, improve data access speeds, offer global email access — Gmail is restricted in some countries — and improved interoperability with other Australian universities.

Gmail will still be used for student email and calendaring, the announcement states. Staff will retain their Google accounts and access to Google apps including Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drive.

But the university plans to separately review the use of Google Apps in 2016, factoring in student and staff requirements.

Image courtesy of Catherine under CC