A GO WUSTL pilot program has been underway since mid-January. Student Technology Services (STS) representatives said it has been a success.

“The feedback has been generally good,” Director of Student Technology Services Barbara Braun said. “There have been a few hiccups along the way that were Microsoft-related.”

According to Marcia Mannen, associate director of client support for Arts & Sciences Computing, most of the questions that students participating in the pilot have raised were not technical. There have not been many questions regarding the actual program, but rather addressing issues such as mail forwarding.

The Student Technology Advisory Committee (STAC) has been happy with the pilot.

“It’s going to be a good transition,” said sophomore Brandon Lucius, a member of STAC. “There are a lot of tools and applications that are going to make students’ lives more organized and efficient.”

Tools available with the new GO WUSTL program include video and text chat, an application similar to Google Documents, and a global address book.

According to Braun, the global address book is among one of the favorite applications of the pilot program participants.

Issues that have plagued the new e-mail service since the pilot started include backlogged e-mail and issues with the spam filters.

Sophomore Betel Ezaz, who is participating in the pilot program, has found some of its drawbacks.

“It seems inefficient right now, even compared to what we already have,” she said. “My main issue is that it loses e-mails and that the spam folder always has legitimate e-mails. I think they can figure it out. They’ve been really good about feedback.”

To remedy the issue with regular mail ending up in spam folders, all e-mails from Wash. U. addresses have been whitelisted.

“Overall I think it will be better because of the options that are available through GO WUSTL,” Ezaz said. “It’s just a matter of working out the small issues before we go live with it. I think it’s good.”

Arts & Sciences and engineering students are making the transition from Squirrelmail.

“From our perspective we know it’s something to be excited about,” said Kristen Hornberger, communications specialist for the Engineering Public Relations & Communications department.

The business school is transitioning from a less advanced version of Microsoft Outlook.

“It’s a very smooth transition,” said Sharon Yoon, associate director of MBA student affairs. “It’s very nice I think. Students are very savvy, and this is very intuitive.”

The old e-mail accounts will not be phased out immediately; their end dates have not yet been decided.

STS will be offering a series of hour-long workshops in early March to help acquaint students with GO WUSTL. In the meetings STS will discuss how to use specific applications and how to forward mail. STS is also encouraging students to look to the GO WUSTL Web site to find answers to simple questions.

Expectations for the program’s success are running high.

“If the pilot program was any indication, it was pretty smooth,” Braun said. “I don’t think it will be too difficult.”

We know that a pilot program will soon be launched that will allow a select group of students to test out the Microsoft Live@Edu system before the University decides to make the switch permanently. We also know exactly what the Live@Edu system includes, and it seems appropriate that Student Union (SU) is enthusiastic to promote it: Microsoft Office products, lots of storage space and connection with social networking sites will certainly be appealing to students.

What we do not know, however, is when the pilot program will begin and how many students will be able to participate. We are also unsure how the University plans to collect and use feedback from the pilot group. Will students be required to fill out surveys or attend focus groups? What sort of reaction from students would cause the University either to adopt or to reject the program? These details need to be made available to students who are considering participating in the pilot program.

It is troubling that this mass communication has failed to address these critical and pertinent questions.

With SU’s new commitment to being as open and as communicative as possible, there is a real risk of information overload. While we appreciate SU’s efforts to keep us informed, SU needs to ensure that its student body e-mails are brief, concise and contain the topic’s most significant details. Given the prevalence of new forms of communication—we can follow SU on Twitter and connect with them on their Web site—it seems unnecessary to enumerate new policies in an e-mail, especially when the e-mail itself provides the links to these online forms of communication.

In his latest e-mail to the student body, Student Union President Jeff Nelson addressed this concern and said that he did not want to clog the student body’s inboxes with unnecessary e-mails. We encourage Student Union to follow through on this message throughout the year.

Our aim is not solely to protect the student body from an unnecessary flood of messages. More importantly, we worry that the effectiveness of SU’s communication is diluted when the student body receives too many unnecessary and long e-mails and begins to hit ‘delete.’ The lack of awareness regarding the pilot program is one clear example of this effect. Although students received the information, it was not presented in a way that got the point across.

Given the enthusiasm we have observed from this year’s SU officers, this phenomenon is unfortunate. In order to ensure that its important messages are received, SU ought to link to online content instead of including large bodies of e-mail text and aim to make all communication as concise and relevant as possible.