At the end of this semester, the NSU email suffixill change from @nova.edu to @mynsu.nova.edu, for all students and alumni, according to the Office of Innovation and Information Technology (OIIT).
The change is scheduled to take place during the weekend of June 2. There will be a layover period of about 120 days, where emails sent to the old account will be forwarded. While the email suffix will change, the email account and all previous information and emails associated with it will remain the same.
Eliana Coronel, the senior director of systems and infrastructure services, said that changing the NSU email suffix will separate the student and alumni accounts from the staff and faculty accounts.
Lial Knight, the senior executive director of infrastructure, networks, and field services, said that the change is beneficial to both students and the university.
Knight said, “By separating things, it preserves NSU’s needs to preserve records and the students’ needs to create a portfolio of information that is useful to them in their studies and in their careers. We believe it will be valuable for records retention for the university and students’ needs going forward.”
In addition to being able to preserve records, the change will also allow Microsoft to differentiate between students and staff and can give students more access to Microsoft products.
Coronel said, “We have a campus agreement with Microsoft so there is a potential for them to offer more on the products side to students: tools that could be used to enhance coursework. With the current email, there is no way for Microsoft to identify who is a student and who is staff and who is a faculty member.”
Knight said that the decision to change the email suffixes is student-driven.
“Microsoft is enriching the products that they offer to full time students and we want to take advantage of that,” he said.
OIIT has been working on this project for over a year now and reached out to the Undergraduate Student Government Association (SGA) for feedback and comments and to gauge the student reaction.
Gabriella Lopez, a junior English major and public relations director of SGA, said SGA was first approached by OIIT last semester about the possible changes as a gauge for student reactions.
SGA had voiced their initial concerns to OIIT, like what would happen to messages sent to the old address. They also surveyed the student population to see how the students felt about the email suffix change.
Lopez said that SGA does not have a stance on the email suffix change at this time.
“As SGA, we want to accurately represent the students and if we find that a bunch of students are unhappy with this, then we will try to fight back and we will push against this change because we are here to represent the students,” Lopez said.
Knight said, “We have heard very good feedback from SGA and we are going to adjust our deployment process, so that it is done in the very best possible way to make the transition better for the students.”
OIIT said that they will start informing the population about the email suffix change in April.
For more information about the email change, contact the OIIT office. If students or alumni would like to voice their concerns regarding the email suffix change to SGA, they can email a senator or go to the Office of Campus Life and Student Engagement for a senator’s office hours. To find contact information for a senator, go to nova.edu/campuslife/sga.
