Bakersfield College, Porterville College and Cerro Coso College have started implementing new student college e-mail system. Students who have already registered for their summer and/or fall classes have already been prompted to create their new e-mail account.
“We won’t be using the new system in an official capacity until the second or third week of fall semester,” BC director of Information Technology David Palinsky said. “That way we know that all registered students will have had the opportunity to learn about the new e-mail accounts.”
The new, more universal student e-mail system will help save the school money. Some of the cost of paper, ink and postage used to mail notifications out to students will be deferred as the student billing info, drop notifications, waitlist notifications and the like can be sent directly to students.
“Although there are certain things that will still need to be sent in the mail to students,” Palinsky said. “The new system will allow us to more directly connect and communicate with students.”
BC is also saving money solely by using the new system, since it is powered by Google and offered free of charge to the school.
The new students e-mails are a precursor to the Luminous Portal, which is tentatively scheduled for implementation in January 2010.
According to meeting minutes of the IT department, The Luminous Portal will be a more interactive homepage for the school, “similar to MyYahoo or iGoogle, which will allow them (students) to customize the page to suit their needs.”
Past incidents of phishing and spamming of BC e-mails, resulting in blacklisting of BC on numerous servers, were a motivation to start the new e-mail system. The new system will further enhance the school’s defenses against such fraudulent e-mails from getting through.
“The past blacklisting instances were the primary reason for implementing this sooner,” Palinsky said. “The original plan was to introduce it with the portal in 2010.”