This past fall, Information and Technology Services announced that U-M will retire BlueJeans effective May 1, 2021 due to a significant drop in use that began with the launch of Zoom last March. From the initial 16,000 users in April, there has been a notable drop to 800 BlueJeans users across all campuses.
“We’re very pleased that campus users have responded and moved the vast majority of their online meetings to Zoom,” said Andy Palms, executive director of infrastructure for ITS. “We’re very optimistic that the remaining BlueJeans users have the information they need to transition to Zoom well before May 1 and to help with smooth retirement.”
ITS is reaching out directly to active users of BlueJeans and is working closely with key stakeholders, unit staff, and IT leadership across all campuses to identify areas of concern and provide direct support where needed. Since ITS began campus outreach in September, the number of meetings held via BlueJeans has dropped 88% with total meeting minutes down by 80%. (See the latest project update for detailed usage data.)
As part of the retirement process, recordings hosted in BlueJeans will no longer be accessible as of May 1. In addition, technical staff have found ways to replace BlueJeans with Zoom in applications where integrations exist:
- As previously announced, access to BlueJeans in Canvas ended January 12, 2021.
- Zoom replaced BlueJeans as the videoconferencing option in Remote Office Hours Queue.
- Work to transition campus ITS videoconferencing systems to support Zoom is ongoing.
In addition to Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams are available at no additional cost for general videoconferencing needs. As a final step, it is important for unit IT staff to update references to BlueJeans on their websites and documentation and to disable any links to BlueJeans on April 30. It is also very important that every member of the U-M community downloads BlueJeans videos that they want to keep, by April 30th.
MORE INFORMATION
- BlueJeans Retirement website
- Transition to Zoom in Canvas
- Contact BlueJeansTeam@umich.edu with questions
