Visiting students to receive Rice Gmail accounts for duration of their stays

By Jeiya Wen     10/1/14 3:53am

The IT department is making provisions for visiting undergraduate students to have Rice Gmail accounts, according to Barry Ribbeck, Director of Systems, Architecture, Infrastructure, Cloud Strategies and Initiatives at Rice University. Visiting students are those enrolled at another college or university, but are approved, enrolled and classified as a non-matriculated Rice student.

Dean of Undergraduates John Hutchinson said visiting students should have the same access to Gmail as other Rice students. The decision to switch visiting students from RiceMail to Rice Gmail was collectively made by the Office of the Dean of Undergraduates, the Office of the Registrar, the IT department and the Administrative Department.

“The Student Association Senators brought this issue to me, explaining that our visiting students were not able to have the same access to Gmail as all other students,” Hutchinson said. “We agreed that this was not appropriate. In the interest of fairness to all students, we wished to extend Gmail access to the visiting students.”

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Google Student Ambassador Julia Hossu said Gmail, unlike RiceMail, is part of Google Apps for Education, which provides educational organizations features including email, online storage, calendars and file sharing within the university.

“Currently, visiting students, faculty and graduate students do not have a Google account due to a variety of intellectual property and privacy reasons,” Hossu, a Martel College senior, said. “The main issue that pops up is they are not officially part of the Rice University Google community, so any documents, surveys, etc. shared publicly to only members of the Rice community will not be accessible to them.”

According to Ribbeck, the IT department is modifying existing account-management software to automatically provide visiting students with Rice Gmail accounts.

“There are two pieces to the process,” Ribbeck said. “One is to ensure that any new incoming students who are marked as visitors get a Gmail account. And then we have to take care of migrating all of the existing visitors from the current mail system to Google.”

According to Manager of Rice IT Technical Communications Carlyn Chatfield, the IT department will migrate visiting students’ RiceMail accounts to Gmail on Sept. 30. 

“During the migration process, [visiting students] will have access to new messages immediately and [their] old messages will be transferred at a rate of 1 message/second until they have all been migrated,” Chatfield said in an email to affected students.

Ribbeck said visiting undergraduate students, like any other Rice student, will retain access to their email accounts for eight months after they leave Rice.

“[Three months after they leave Rice], we remove the ability for the students to be able to change their passwords,” Ribbeck said. “All the services still work. Sometime in the fall, we start a cleanup process. We start doing communications with them, for about two to three months. Generally in December or January, all the [graduated] students are purged from the system. All [their data] are gone.”

Bela Kelbecheva, a visiting student from Paris, said she is happy about this change because with her RiceMail account, she has no access to other Google Apps resources.

“[RiceMail] was OK to write emails,” Kelbecheva said. “But it’s impossible to delete mails on [RiceMail]. If you delete it, it still stays there, just crossed out. [RiceMail is] a bit inefficient overall, [and it is] hard to find old emails. I’m happy that communication within Rice is facilitated for me.”

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