Faculty and Staff: take note of key dates related to Google Workspace changes; email and calendar migration

Shared Drive decisions, consideration of special account types, and implementation of storage caps are underway.

29 Jan 2024

From: Collaborative Computing Solutions, Division of Information Technology

Google service changes are underway for university employees. This notice gives a summary of these changes: for more detail, visit the Google and Microsoft License Changes website.

Overall Timeline for Employees

DATE	ACTIONS & EVENTS
Jan. 15 - March 1, 2024	Employee Gmail and Google calendars were migrated to Exchange Online, including existing GAE accounts, for 99 percent of employees.
Feb. 15, 2024	Google Shared Drives that were not claimed by a department went read-only.
March 1, 2024	Deletion of data from unclaimed alumni-managed Shared Drives began.
March 15, 2024	Organizational units (OUs)/ departments implemented storage allocation plans for individual employee Google storage and Shared Drives. Drives that are over their storage allocation went read-only.
April 12, 2024	Deletion of data from unclaimed student- or retiree-managed Shared Drives begins.
May 1, 2024	Deletion of data from unclaimed employee-managed Shared Drives begins. OUs / departments confirm FY 2025 storage purchases.

Email and calendar migrations

The migration to Exchange Online / Outlook is nearly complete for all employees. Individuals can check their email migration status by logging into the My Collaborative Accounts tool (MyCAT). Guidance on using Exchange Online is available.

Shared Drives

Employees should review Shared Drives they have access to.

In the MyCAT tool, you can view your roles and storage totals by scrolling down and expanding the Google tab to access the Shared Drives section. For Shared Drives where you are a Manager, you can confirm the course of action your OU administrator (the local IT professional(s) who work with departments to manage cloud/collaboration user groups) has selected: to Keep the Shared Drive, Migrate it to SharePoint, or Remove the drive and delete its contents.

For Shared Drives that will be deleted, you should review their contents and export a copy of any files you want to keep.

In the MyCAT tool, you can view your OU's plan for your Shared Drives.

Complete information on how to assess and take action on Shared Drives is available. Don’t forget that you can find the names of your OU administrators in your MyCAT profile.

Google Auxiliary Email accounts

Some of you will need to decide what should happen with Google Auxiliary Email (GAE) accounts that you have access to, as GAE accounts will be phased out by the end of April 2024.

These accounts were used to allow shared access to a group email account, calendar, and Google Workspace. In many cases, GAE accounts can be replaced with either a Personal Access for Collaborative Email (PACE) Exchange account or a Google Group. Visit the 4Help Knowledge Base for a feature comparison.

For employees, storage caps went into effect March 15