Published: Monday, October 5, 2009 in The Whitworthian.

If there’s one thing history has taught us, it’s that change is good. Without change, cars would never have caught on, farmers would still plow fields by hand, and we’d all still think that “I Love Lucy” is edgy entertainment.

Of course, if there’s anything else that history has taught us, it’s that as long as there’s been change, there’s been the fear of change. If you listen to the side of history that didn’t make it, you probably still believe the airplane is an affront to God, television is a passing fad and sliced bread is absolutely not the best thing since anything.

All that to say, the new e-mail system is a change. And yes, while change rouses us out of our sleepy, comfortable fear-mongering ruts, it is a good change.

Rumor has it that the big impetus behind the switchover was the number of complaints received about the old system not having enough storage space. If you were one of those complaining, rejoice! Your new account has more storage than you’ll probably know what to do with. There’s a good chance you could make a New Year’s resolution to never delete any messages and not run out of space until you’re too old to care.

That experiment would also be made possible by the fact that the accounts will remain active after graduation. The benefits of this might not be immediately apparent, but bear with me. One of the complaints I’ve heard about the new system is that for upperclassmen who are using their school e-mail to contact potential employers, or to set up internships, or to do any of the professional computer mediated communicating that upperclassmen are known to do, will have to go through the hassle of making sure all those contacts get the new e-mail address.

Admittedly, this will be an irritating step. But when it’s finished, you won’t ever have to do it again unless you want to. On the old system, you would have had to go through this address revolution after you graduated anyway, because your account would have been deactivated. This way, you’re just getting it done a little bit early, and your contacts can continue to use the new Whitworth e-mail address for as long as you want them to.

The new system also grants students access to a host of tools which I suspect will prove useful and productive in the months to come. The most intriguing of these tools are Office Live and the Skydrive. Office Live is essentially Microsoft Office online. You can create, edit, view and share Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, and Excel spreadsheets all online, from any computer. So you could write your paper in your room, then go to class and pull it up and print it there. Creating Powerpoint presentations for classes won’t require you to remember to bring a flash drive on Monday morning at 8 a.m. anymore–your slide show will be waiting for you in your Office Live account.

The Skydrive is also a powerful tool. It’s a child of the new “cloud storage” phenomenon that’s drawing “ooos” and “aaahs” from geek crowds around the world. Think of it as your student drive on the Whitworth network, but accessible from anywhere you have an Internet connection. You can save any file to it, and be able to access it from class, from home or from your Uncle Bill’s house in France. It could potentially also make group projects much easier. Groups could store their work on the Skydrive and share it with each other, ensuring that everyone will have access to the file when they need it.
It really is a much better system, and ultimately a necessary upgrade from the archaic client that we’ve been using all this time.

Don’t fear the change, airplane haters. It’s a good thing.