A key ITS area of focus is “to work as one ITS team to improve the way we serve the U-M campus.” This has the potential for significant impact. A recent dialogue between the digital accessibility and collaboration teams is an outstanding example of how ITS can benefit users far beyond our campus. Like many vendors of cloud-based… Read More »
To better accommodate the need for team-based chat and collaboration, Google Hangouts Chat is now available for use at U-M. Hangouts Chat is a G Suite for Education core service. It is free and covered under U-M’s agreement with Google and also can be used for certain kinds of sensitive data. It should not be used for protected… Read More »
In February, Google announced plans to transition from classic Hangouts to Hangouts Chat. Hangouts Chat is a workstream collaboration tool that allows for team-based discussion, bots, and more. Google provided a timeline of changes and initially stated they would start retiring classic Hangouts in October, 2019. However, there have been delays as Google listened to critical customer feedback… Read More »
In 2017, Google announced Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet for team communication. Later this year, Google will transition classic Hangouts to Chat and Meet on the UMICH domain. As a first step, some changes are coming on April 16, 2019. Key dates to note: Starting April 16, 2019 – Chat will begin to gradually roll out to U-M Google accounts on… Read More »
Since the university’s adoption of services such as Google’s G Suite and BlueJeans, the user base for Microsoft Lync, an instant messaging and conferencing tool, has been slowly declining. Because of this, the Ross School of Business, which has hosted and maintained the service for use by campus, will retire Microsoft Lync on January 29, 2018. Current users of… Read More »