For more than a few years now Google has offered students an opportunity to serve as liaisons between their campus and Google through the Google Student Ambassador Program. Students selected for the program participate for one school year. During the program, students might be challenged to demonstrate how Google products can enhance studying or sociallizing, and they are invited to Mountain View for a training summit July 30 & 31.
HMC’s Google Apps Manager has requested referrals for the program and provided more information about the program.  Google would like to receive recommendations by May 4th.
For 2012-2013 Student Ambassador Referrals, please visit this site: http://goo.gl/kXXWx

To learn more about the program, please visit this site: http://goo.gl/RZ316

Migration of administrative staff email and calendars to MS Office365 is moving along. The Computing and Information Services department and the Office of the President have been migrated to the new service, with the College Advancement department completing this week.
The target for completion of all HMC staff email migrations is first week of June.

Updated pricing plans for MS Office365 for education were posted last month. The highlight of these changes for our campus is the Academic Plan A2 being offered for free to students, faculty and staff. More details can be found at Learn About Office365.

Migrations of faculty email accounts from Zimbra mailbox-01, Odin, and Thuban mail systems continue. These migrations continue to be completed via one-on-one, in-person support from the User Support Group. Our current count is (61) faculty members migrated in the past six months. In April, May, and early June, the project team will focus on the Engineering and Chemistry departments, as other academic departments are more than 80% complete.
The target for mailbox-01 shutdown of email service for faculty is first week of June.

Investigation of calendaring functions available within and between Google Apps and Office365 continues. During the calendar migration process, the project team learned that recurring events would need to be recreated.

Ongoing development and socialization of project documentation, which includes new information for Office365 available on HMC email.

Tracking of function or feature inquiries related to email, calendar and other compatible collaboration applications continues. These inquiries should be emailed to helpdesk@hmc.edu for tracking and communications via a ticket with the project team.
The project team continues to post updates to the google site tracking our activities, Google Apps for HMC

This past summer, all HMC students email accounts were migrated from Zimbra (mailbox-02) and onto Google Apps.  You may also know that we are currently migrating faculty email accounts from Zimbra (mailbox-01) to Google Apps as well.

Early on in the migration, we received reports from students that when they send emails to their own @hmc.edu address (which forwards directly to their Google Apps accounts), or when they send to a mailing list that contains their own @hmc.edu address, they did not get the email back in their Inbox.

Here are some common statements that describe the situation:
- I sent an email through Google Apps with my @hmc.edu email address in the To, CC, or BCC, field, but I never received that email back in my Inbox.
- My @hmc.edu email address is a member of a mailing list.  However, when I emailed that mailing list, I never got my own email back in my Inbox.

We immediately began testing this thoroughly and found that it seemed like Google was dropping a message if it detected the message had made a forwarding loop back to the sender.  We thought it might be a spam detection issue initially.  We contacted our Google Apps support rep with a thorough description of the issue and offered to demonstrate it.  However, the rep had not heard of the issue and could not help us.

We did some research ourselves and found the answer, on Google’s support page:
http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=82454

The page above is a troubleshooting guide for when you don’t receive an email that you expect.  Near the middle of the page, they say:

“Finally, if you’re sending mail to a mailing list that you subscribe to, those messages will only appear in ‘Sent Mail.’ This behavior also occurs when sending to an email address that automatically forwards mail back to your Gmail address.”

So essentially, Google is saying that if you send an email that makes a roundtrip (through forwarding or mailing lists) back to your own Google Apps account, you won’t get it in your Inbox!  This behavior is definitely not what most people expect!  We understand that most people want to get a copy of their own email back in their Inbox as a confirmation that the email went out to a list successfully.  We will soon contact our rep to give our feedback and desire to have this behavior changed.  Thanks for all that have reported this issue to us!

For a while now, rumors had been floating around about the third generation iPad.  Some sites claimed to have received a leaked screen with resolutions of 2048 by 1536.  There were also other sites with photos claiming to be of the new processor in the iPad.  The biggest mystery, though, was what it would be called.

On March 7, 2012, Apple announced their third generation iPad, and we found out that it would simply be called “iPad”, or the “new iPad” as Apple said in their announcement.
The biggest question that everyone has is, what is different in the new iPad from the iPad 2, or original iPad?
Wikipedia has a great chart (at this location), but essentially, the new iPad has these features:

- a very high resolution screen.  Even higher than your HDTV.  So high that your eyes can’t tell the pixels apart, and reading webpages on it look like reading a magazine.
- a slightly faster processor
- much faster graphics (quad core graphics)
- a much better outside camera at 5 mp, but the inside camera is still the same as before
- slightly thicker and slightly heavier
- same price

CIS has two of the new iPads available for short term loans (no more than 2 weeks at a time).  They are the 16GB WiFi versions.  A short term loan is probably best suited for those on the fence whether to get one or to see if it suits your needs.  If you would like to borrow one for a short term loan, please let the Help Desk know!

When you hear about the Xbox Kinect, you probably think about interactive video games on the Xbox 360, such as Kinect Sports, Kinectimals, or Dance Central.  But did you know that the Kinect, as an advanced motion sensing device, can be used for non-gaming applications such as robotics, academic research, medical use, rehabilitation centers, and sound testing?  Microsoft calls this the “Kinect Effect”, and they document it here on their website: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/Kinect/Kinect-Effect

Microsoft has also produced a video advertising the “Kinect Effect”:

In February 2012, Microsoft launched the “Kinect for Windows” hardware as a Kinect that can be used on a regular Windows PC right out of the box.  The Software Development Kit (SDK) is included as well.  Internally, the “Kinect for Windows” is probably identical to the Xbox 360 Kinect.  This kit, however, includes a proper AC adapter to power the Kinect, and includes the official Windows SDK.

CIS has purchased a “Kinect for Windows” available for immediate loan to faculty, staff, and students.  If you would like to borrow it, please let the CIS Help Desk know!