Districtwide emails created for students om Pierce o cials

you get a discount,” Dominguez said.

Cloud computing –no software installation necessary.

Your email includes:

Los Angeles Community College District will deploy Outlook and other Microsoft web applications at Pierce College to standardize student emails, enable greater collaboration and provide students with 35GB of combined storage by this summer.

Joseph D. Perret, professor of Computer Applications and Office Technologies at Pierce, is happy with what Microsoft Outlook and SkyDrive will bring to students.

“Some of the benefits are calendaring, contacts and a to-do list,” Perret said.

The district will be sending emails to students’ personal email addresses on April 2 to inform them of the switch to the new student emails one last time.

Albert Saryan, supervising system and programming analyst for LACCD, provided an official list of what students will have access to through the system:

10 GB of email space.

25 GB of SkyDrive - cloud network drive to store documents, pictures and photos.

Online access to Microsoft products such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

The LACCD wants “a constant and reliable means of communication between the campuses and the students,” Saryan said.

Students are actively being issued email accounts, but the target date of the official launch is over the spring break, according to Saryan.

-10 GB of email space.

-25 GB of SkyDrive - cloud network drive to store documents, pictures and photos.

-Online access to Microsoft products such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

Also, don’t look for an “app for that.” Saryan definitively said there will be no mobile app for LACCD emails or web applications. He suggests students use whatever method they choose to access live.com to check email on the go.

Perret, who assisted with the new email system, agrees with the district wanting more control of student’s emails.

“Students are recalcitrant entering an email in the

Pierce College needs to improve on overall planning, student learning outcomes and internal cash control mechanisms according to findings from a team of educators who spent nearly a week on campus to make judgments on the institution’s performance and effectiveness.

The 11-member team’s visited last week is the latest step in a two-year-long process of reaffirming the college’s accreditation for the next six years.

The exit report was presented in the Great Hall March 14 to give closure to the visit and to give the accreditation team a platform to inform administration, faculty and staff of its members’ findings.

The three areas in the school’s institutional efforts that were given recommendations for refinement were determined after the group made trips to at least 30 classes and offices to interview system and they change them frequently too,” Perret said.

The system currently hosts roughly 20,000 users daily across the nine LACCD campuses with a provision of 500,000 accounts, Saryan said.

Deandre Allen, 22, was surprised by the new student email but has a wish list of items he’d like to see it provide. “Grade percentage, syllabus, class notes… If they could make it into an app then it would probably be perfect for everybody,” Allen said.

Another student, Edith Dominguez, 20, does know about the new email and echoes another benefit not known by many.

“I heard about it because when I log in for your student information it says that you have a new email and I think it’s good because if you have a college email students, faculty and staff according to Accreditation Team Chair Peter Garcia.

Coincidentally, Pierce President Kathleen Burke-Kelly said even before the team revealed their findings that the school’s overall planning could be one of the aspects singled out by the accreditation team.

“I think that our integrated planning process is still relatively new,” she said in an interview on March 12.

Still, Garcia seems confident in Pierce’s ability to take the recommendations in stride.

“This is a committed college that is doing the right work and seems to be in the right direction,” he said during the exit report. “We found not an angry, bitter college. What we heard was a college willing to make itself better.”

For the most part, Garcia, who spoke on behalf of the group for the exit report, gave compliments to Pierce.

[See ACCREDITATION, Page 3]

Indeed, free stuff and discounts abound with a student.laccd.edu address. Here is a handful of what students can get for using their school email:

Professional Microsoft design, development, server and certification software

AutoDesk design and development software

Prezi presentation and virtual whiteboard software Unlimited, free, two-day shipping from Amazon for six months

Save $25 for online orders at ATT and get discounts on mobile service

There are also students, however, who use one of the big free email services like Yahoo or Gmail and worry about having to check multiple places for important emails.

“I would really like if it would just forward to my normal email,” said 18-year-old student Oriel Sastiel.

To forward emails to Yahoo or Gmail easily, login to your student email, click “Options” then “See All Options” then “Forward your e-mail” on the right.

Perret recommends students leave a copy of the forwarded emails on their school server as a protection against accidental deletion.

[See EMAILS, Page 3]