Julie Elman started using Box for her classes because she was having trouble with the visual communication servers, but she will eventually have to store her files somewhere else.
Ohio University will be switching from Box, an online storage solution, to OneDrive in December 2018 in order to reduce costs and increase storage.
“I knew the students had access to Box and I did too, (so) I just set up stuff on Box,” Elman, an associate professor in the School of Visual Communications, said.
She said Box has worked well for her classes.
“I haven’t really given much time and thought to what I am going to do once Box is gone,” Elman said. “But, I am going to have to do something and I am concerned about that.”
Box cost the university more than $110,000 from February 2014 until February 2017. If OU were to continue to use Box, it would cost more than $141,000 until February 2019, Craig Bantz, chief information officer for the Office of Information Technology, said
“We cannot support those types of price increases,” Bantz said in an email.
Microsoft does not charge under the plan Office 365 Education for their cloud services.
About 15 percent of the OU’s student population uses Box, and OU has thousands of OneDrive users, Bantz said.
Lukas Johansson, a sophomore studying chemical engineering, said he has not used Box before but uses OneDrive for his classwork.
“I used OneDrive back in high school … so I already understood how the system works,” Johansson said. “When I saw that the Catmail server was running through Outlook, I figured I should look into that and see if they are using OneDrive as well.”
Johansson said he likes OneDrive because it is easy for him to transfer files between his computer and any computer on campus.
“If I leave my computer somewhere and want to access the files on my phone or really anywhere else, I can easily go in and look at my files, edit anything that I need to and have everything in one place,” Johansson said.
Students will have time to transfer data stored in Box before the switch to OneDrive.
“People will have plenty of time to move their data out of BOX,” Bantz said in an email. “It will be close to two years before OHIO BOX accounts will be disabled and eventually deleted.”
Tim Goheen, visual communication director and associate professor, said he has a lot of files on Box that he uses for classes and is worried about switching all of them over to OneDrive.
“The problem is having the time to switch over, making sure there is hard drive space as you prepare to move things over,” he said. “If I would have known, I wouldn’t have used Box.”
OneDrive provides services that Box does not.
“OneDrive provides online versions of the Microsoft Office like Word, Excel and PowerPoint,” Bantz said in an email. “These online versions of Office allow students, faculty and staff to edit the same document at the same time, similar to Google Docs.”
OU considered using Google Drive, but it would require moving the university’s entire mail system from Microsoft to Gmail, Bantz said.
Switching to Gmail would be difficult, costly and it would also take several years to complete.
“Given our current time constraints, such a change is just not possible,” Bantz said in an email. “We have several hundred thousand email accounts and many terabytes of data stored with Microsoft.”
Johansson said OU’s decision to switch over to OneDrive is a good idea.
“(OneDrive) is already through the Outlook server which is the same thing we use for our email,” Johansson said. “It would just make sense to make everything all in one system rather than trying to spread things out over different platforms.”
