USU students have expanding options for cloud storage

The Utah State University community may never have to search for data storage space again.

This week, two new programs — Box.com and Google Drive for Education — are being offered to Utah State students and faculty.

Both Box.com and Google Drive are cloud services, meaning their information is stored in an off-campus location by a company other than the USU Department of Information Technology.

“The server of the data doesn’t reside here on campus,” said TJ Hilton, the Aggiemail coordinator for Utah State. “IT (Information Technology) just acts as a broker between the people using the program and the people providing the program.”

Google Drive for Education

On Friday, Google Apps for Education — the service that hosts Utah State’s Aggiemail accounts — changed to Google Drive for Education, which gives unlimited storage space to all of its users.

This upgrade allows all students and faculty with Aggiemail accounts access to unlimited cloud storage space.

Utah State students can now have all of their documents in one location without worry, according to Hilton.

“You never have to worry that you’re going to run out of space,” Hilton said. “You never have to worry if your mailbox is too big.”

According to Google’s Sep. 30 press release, students can store files in their drive that are as large as five terabytes.

Hilton noted that Aggiemail doesn’t expire when a student graduates, so those with an account have unlimited storage for life.

“Students are encouraged to create an Aggiemail and keep using that Aggiemail account forever,” Hilton said. “People who use this account for the rest of their lives will never have to worry that they have too many files.”

Hilton said those who use Aggiemail accounts beyond graduation will help promote the university. He said it is “a great public relations and marketing tool to help get the USU name out.”

“We can let people know that, yes, we have all these people who were at our school, they graduated,” Hilton said. “It allows them to retain that connection.”

Google Drive for Education is offered as a free service to higher-education students. Offering it for free may have been a business move for Google, according to Hilton.

“They know that if people get used to using their products while they’re in school, they’ll be used to their products,” Hilton said. “That forces businesses who are hiring graduates to use the Google products.”

Box.com

Utah State’s IT Department started to advertise Box.com — a collaboration and storage program — to the Utah State community this week.

Box.com will be useful to students as a collaborative tool, according to Kevin Reeve, who is in charge of communications for IT.

On Monday the IT Department began circulating advertisements for Box.com.

Utah State invested in the website at the beginning of fall semester, but IT has been beta testing the website and preparing to train students and teachers for the past few months. Now, Reeve said Box.com is ready to be introduced to students.

Box.com offers 50 GB of storage to students and 100GB of storage to faculty. Although it’s not unlimited, Reeve said it is a sufficient amount of data.

“Fifty GB is quite a bit if you think about it,” Reeve said.

Reeve said Box.com offers a wider range of collaborative tools.

“Box has more collaboration features that Google Drive does not,” Reeve said. “You can invite collaborators to share your folders, you can make comments on files and it keeps track of the versions. It has a ton of features.”

Box.com is also being used with Canvas, as some teachers are already using it to share documents with their students. Reeve said students could also use Box.com to submit assignments on Canvas.

“Wherever they are, students would be able to save their stuff, store it in Box, and if it crashes or their laptop gets stolen, they can pull it up on a mobile device and submit their files through canvas,” Reeve said.

Reeve said Box won’t be difficult for the Utah State community to learn.

“If people just want to use it as storage, it’s simple,” Reeve said. “It works like Dropbox and Google Docs. If you want to do all the other stuff, the collaboration and stuff, it’s not difficult. You just watch a video and figure out how to do it or look up an article that will teach you some of the cool features.”

— melmo12@gmail.com