TCD is first university in Europe to Adopt Gmail for its Students

Posted on: 08 March 2007

Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and Google are to collaborate to provide the College’s 15,000 students with Gmail, Google’s e-mail application, as the college’s new e-mail system. TCD is the first university in Europe to introduce Gmail for its student e-mail needs, allowing the College’s students to retain their TCD e-mail address for life.

With this service, students will retain their TCD e-mail address, @tcd.ie, yet enjoy all the added benefits associated with Gmail such as indexed e-mail search, enhanced spam filtering, calendaring, tagging capabilities for tracking e-mail as well as an unrivalled two-gigabyte storage quota per student. Trinity’s students will also get to keep a TCD e-mail box, even after graduation – delivering e-mail for life for Trinity’s alumni.

Commenting on the significance of the partnership between Trinity and Google, TCD Provost, Dr John Hegarty said: “Through this innovative alliance with a technology leader such as Google, Trinity College will be able to provide technology and service of a very high quality to all its students and future graduates. As the first Irish university and European university in this domain, Trinity College aims to meet the growing technological needs of all our students with the advanced communication tools which Google can provide in this unique collaboration..”

Welcoming the announcement, John Herlihy, European Director, Online Sales & Operations, Google said: “We are very excited to be partnering with an august and progressive college such as Trinity on this project. Their vision of how technology can enhance student life and build a long term relationship with college alumni is shared by Google”.

The conversion to Gmail will occur over the next few months and the transition is planned to be completed by October 2007.

Google currently provides its e-mail application to educational groups under its Google Apps for Education solution. This is a set of hosted applications for educational organisations that want to provide high quality communications tools to their users without the hassle of installing and maintaining software or hardware. It features e-mail, calendar and instant messaging tools.