January 23, 2014

SIU moving from Google Drive to SkyDrive Pro

Beginning in February, Enterprise Applications will transition all faculty and staff from document storage using Google Drive to SkyDrive Pro. The transition will create a more secure, university-controlled environment for documents and data and provides faculty and staff with a true and robust file management solution.
Among the features that SkyDrive Pro’s document management capabilities will offer:

• online readers that render many file types
• full text search
• seamless integration with Windows
• online editors for Office documents

SkyDrive Pro’s features translate into powerful benefits for users including:

• file versioning
• collaborative editing among multiple users
• document sharing
• document following

Another distinct advantage of implementing SkyDrive Pro is that it creates a university-controlled and maintained cloud. SIU will know exactly where information is stored and have full control over that information. Sensitive documents will no longer be subject to control by an outside service provider.

Transitioning the faculty and staff to SkyDrive Pro also lays the foundation for a campus-wide rollout of SharePoint 2013 throughout 2014. This amazing tool allows workgroups to connect, communicate, coordinate, and collaborate using the tools on a SharePoint Team Site. The transition from Google Drive to SkyDrive Pro will occur in stages, by department. Faculty and staff will be notified when to provision SkyDrive Pro and be provided with instructions to transition documents stored in Google Drive. It is important to make the change when scheduled because when the transition period ends the university will no longer provide access to Google Drive.