Google Mail: Keeping Track of Things

As previously mentioned in BroncoBytes, your Office of Information Technology will be migrating faculty and staff from GroupWise mail and calendaring to Google Apps later this year (student migration from BroncoMail starts in March).

One of those Google Apps (and certainly the one you’ll likely be using most) is Google Mail. Today we’ll look at differences between GroupWise and Google Mail with respect to how they each organize mail items, as well as store archived mail.

Folders vs. Labels

GroupWise organizes mail messages using Folders. Google Mail organizes messages using Labels. In truth, both applications conceptually organize mail in the same manner, they just present that organization in different ways.

Let’s say you currently have a GroupWise folder called “University Business” that you use to store email from University executives. If you want to find copies of these emails later, you can easily do so by opening the University Business folder and searching for particular messages. After a specified number of days, mail in the University Business folder will automatically be archived, and you can open your GroupWise Archive to locate old mail.

Of course, the chief problem with this scenario is if you’re trying to retrieve an archived mail message from another computer (especially a computer not on campus), it may be impossible to do so if you don’t have access to your GroupWise Archive location. As opportunities for remote computing continue to become more widespread, your inability to access archived GroupWise messages becomes more and more inconvenient (and believe us, we’ve heard from many of you how inconvenienced you’ve already been).

The dreaded GroupWise “I can’t find your Archive” error.

Google Mail solves this issue by keeping all of your organized mail and your archived mail in one location, always accessible from any location. As long as you have an internet connection, you’ll always have access to all of your email (not to mention your calendar items and documents).

Instead of organizing your email messages in folders, Google Mail provides you with Labels to ‘affix’ to your messages. You can then archive these labeled messages to remove them from your inbox. However, unlike GroupWise, when you do archive a message in Google Mail, the mail doesn’t move into another database. It’s always accessible in Google Mail by simply clicking the appropriate Label category. And, mail messages can have more than one Label, so you can categorize your mail however you see fit. Plus, you can associate colors with Labels.

So, say goodbye to the plethora of potential problems associated with GroupWise Archives!

Keep Track of Important Items

Google Mail lets you apply a Star to any items you deem of importance. Or any items you want to make into “to-do” mails. Or any items you want to take care of before noon. Whatever you want to affix a Star to, for whatever reason, is up to you to decide.

Stay tuned for more Google Apps info next week!