All students, staff and faculty have an email account provided by the school. New this year, the platform for school-wide email accounts is Google Mail via Google Apps for Education.
Google Apps for Education is a more modern collaboration platform compared to the previous system used, Zimbra.
The three main features of GAE are Google Mail, Google Drive and Google hangouts. All three of these features are available to students at EMU.
Google Mail is a feature most students are familiar with. It offers a search engine of all school addresses, as well as a consistent account to receive emails from the university, students, professors and emergency emails about things on campus.
Google Drive is available through the Google Mail account provided. The Google Drive is where students and faculty can save documents and share documents with one another. For those that have used Google Drive before, with a personal account it works the same way. This gives students and faculty the ability to separate the school documents from personal documents.
If a student or faculty were to have both a personal and school Google Drive account the accounts are separate. Personal documents would not be seen on the school Google Drive.
The last feature highlight with GAE is the Google hangout. The Google hangout provides chat between other Google Mail users on a chat or on a video chat.
Students and faculty can use both accounts at the same time by going to the top right hand corner of the Chrome page, clicking on the picture emoticon and clicking “add account.” This will not put emails into one account but it will allow the user to have multiple email tabs open at the same time.
If problems were to occur with Google Email call the IT help desk at (734) 487-2120.
