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Dartmouth is standardizing institutional email on Microsoft 365. Gmail-based institutional email accounts are no longer being created or assigned to users.
Why This Change Is Being Made
Dartmouth is consolidating institutional email onto a single platform to improve security, simplify operations, improve reliability, and provide a more consistent user experience.
This effort is also intended to improve the overall functionality and dependability of institutional email for critical areas of the college, including research, administrative operations, financial processes, institutional communications, and external collaboration.
Operating two separate institutional email systems creates technical limitations that become increasingly difficult to manage at enterprise scale. As email security standards, identity protections, spam prevention, and delivery requirements continue to evolve, maintaining split email platforms introduces complexity that directly impacts reliability, consistency, and the institution's ability to uniformly protect users. This effort is focused on improving the overall experience and protection of Dartmouth users, not reducing access to collaboration tools.
Security
Email remains one of the primary attack vectors facing higher education institutions. Consolidating institutional email onto a single platform allows Dartmouth to apply more consistent security protections, monitoring, threat detection, and incident response capabilities across the institution.
This is particularly important for departments and roles that work with sensitive information, financial operations, research data, administrative systems, and institutional leadership communications.
Mail Delivery and Reliability
Modern email delivery increasingly depends on tightly integrated identity, authentication, reputation, and anti-phishing technologies. Operating multiple email platforms introduces technical complexity that can affect message delivery reliability, spam classification, forwarding behavior, and overall user experience. Standardizing on a single email platform reduces these limitations and improves consistency for both senders and recipients.
Identity and Access Integration
Microsoft 365 is tightly integrated with Dartmouth's identity and security infrastructure, including NetID, Duo MFA, Entra ID, Conditional Access, and institutional monitoring systems. Aligning institutional email to a single platform improves consistency in authentication, account protection, and lifecycle management.
Operational Support and Incident Response
Security investigations, account recovery, auditing, support processes, and service troubleshooting are significantly more effective when institutional email operates within a unified platform.
What Is Changing
- New populations, including the incoming Class of 2030, will not be provisioned into Gmail for institutional email.
- New employee and affiliate email accounts will be provisioned in Microsoft 365.
- Existing Gmail-based email accounts will transition to Microsoft 365 over a multi-year period.
- Institutional email services will continue to align more closely with Dartmouth's identity and security platforms.
What Is Not Changing
This change is specific to institutional email. Google Workspace remains available for collaboration and productivity use cases where appropriate. Dartmouth is not eliminating Google Workspace services as part of this effort.
Department Requests for New Gmail Accounts
Departments requesting Gmail-based email accounts for new hires, affiliates, or other newly provisioned users will be directed to Microsoft 365 instead.
At this time, Dartmouth is strongly discouraging the creation of new Gmail-based institutional email accounts as part of the broader transition to a single email platform.
If you have questions or concerns about this change, please submit a ticket to the Help Desk.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Is Google Workspace going away?
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No. Google Workspace remains available for collaboration and productivity use cases. This change only applies to institutional email.
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Why can't Dartmouth continue operating both email systems?
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Maintaining multiple institutional email platforms increases complexity around security, mail delivery, identity integration, support, and incident response.
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Can departments request Gmail for new accounts?
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New accounts are being provisioned in Microsoft 365 as part of Dartmouth's long-term email standardization effort.
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Are existing Gmail users being migrated immediately?
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No. Existing Gmail-based email accounts will transition over multiple years as part of a phased approach.
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External Resources
See Related Articles to the right for more information.