AUSA emails guide
Aberdeen University Students Association (AUSA) recognises the challenges that come with managing the society, sport club or a student group, and we appreciate your commitment to making being a part of the activity an enjoyable and welcome experience for all members. AUSA’s mission is to support you on this journey. That’s why we have developed a guide, that will make it easier for you to use your new AUSA email inbox (g-suite), which we are rolling out for all activities.
Let’s start with the basics... what is your AUSA email/g-suite?
G-suite is a cloud tool for enterprises compromised of Gmail, Calendar, Drive and Keep among others that enables collaboration and facilitates flow of information throughout the organisation. You are probably familiar with g-suite solutions already; your personal email account might be a Gmail one or you used Drive to do a university group project or assignment.
What are the benefits of g-suite?
Firstly, G-suite makes it easier for your activity to do handovers. How so? You will be able to create a folder on the Drive with all the handover documents that can be accessed by the person who will be taking over your activity role. What’s more, AUSA can help you get access to your account in case you have trouble logging into it or help with the process of recovering it, in case your activity was not handed over login and password details. However, please note your account is secure and solely yours, and those with whom you share login details with.
G-suite also makes it possible for your activity to store and access your files from any device wherever you are. Files kept on the drive are automatically accessible to all team members making the process of sharing files effortless.
What’s more, an additional feature of g-suite is the possibility of creating professionally sounding email addresses, swapping @gmail.com with @youractivity.com.
Why are we making this change?
In order to increase online security of AUSA and the University, we will be closing Outlook (@abdn.ac.uk) accounts of societies, sports clubs and student groups and g-suite solution is offered instead. Hence, all the AUSA communication going forward will be delivered to your g-suite address. We also want to make the handover process easier and with g-suite we can ensure that every year new committee will be provided with login details to their email account. Lastly, it will help show other organisations you are an affiliated to AUSA which should help make tasks in future like room bookings easier.
What does your activity need to do to gain access to g-suite?
The login details will be sent to the activity president each year to ensure security of the account.
You don’t have to worry about missing any emails delivered to your activity previous email address since there is an easy and quick way to set up automatic forwarding from your previous email address to the new g-suite account.
Here is an instruction, explaining how to turn on auto-forwarding in Gmail and how to export contacts from Gmail and import them to g-suite
If you have an outlook account, we will let the University IT team know, and they will set up auto-forwarding for you. To export your contacts from outlook follow this guide, and in order to import them see this instruction.
One I recieve my AUSA email, what should I do first?
For Student Activities currently operating an (@abdn.ac.uk) email, you will soon lose access to your email address, so it’s important you start moving over what you need over to your new account. We have created a check list of things you should do before the closing date which will be the end of January 2021.
For those who do not have an (@abdn.ac.uk) email address – it will be up to you how quickly and what you move over to your new address. We highly recommend you move over to the new account for the reasons listed already, but we will also be moving all our official AUSA updates and comms to that email, so it will be important that you monitor it.
Who should I share the username and password with and what are the rules?
You should only share the password for the email with members of your committee.
Who I should contact if I have more questions?
If you have any queries or would like to chat to us about this, please get in touch on: societies@abdn.ac.uk. We are always happy to hear from you!
Please click here to read the AUSA Emails T&C's.