Adelaide Uni using GMail

I read this morning that the University of Adelaide will be moving their 16,000 students to GMail with one substantial benefit being their mailbox quotas will increase from 250Mb to 7Gb (not to mention the huge savings from not having to host, store and manage these in-house anymore).

This seems a pretty smart move to me – plus you get some really nice calendar integration. You could have a separate calendar for every course the student is enrolled in, and then use the overlay feature of Google Calendar to have them all displayed together.

I remember asking a similar question at an IT workshop at UniSA a few years ago along the lines of “If GMail gives me 2Gb of quota, why am I stuck with a only 30Mb?”. If I recall correctly the answer given at the time was similar to that given by Adelaide regarding its staff accounts, but they’ve obviously been able to work through the legal and technical hurdles for their students at least..

I see that things are slightly better at UniSA now than when I left – regular staff will now get 200Mb, though that’s still 1/5 of what their Adelaide colleagues enjoy. Ouch!

Clever video U@50

You know how sometimes friends or colleagues sometimes forward emails with silly things, like painted cats or funny office videos?

Well Liz forwarded this to me the other day and I finally got around to watching it, and yes it is very clever.

Of course you know, this means…

I received an email from a “Gary” a few days ago. Unfortunately my reply didn’t seem to reach him due to problems with his email server. Looking at his email address, I’d guess Gary works for the US Army. Hence my alarm when I saw the following in GMail!

Trying to be more alert than alarmed, I’m relieved to report that “THIS IS A WAR..” is actually “THIS IS A WARNING” :-)