Since late August, University Systems has been working hard to welcome students back to campus with an option for more modern student email: Roundcube. The service has been offered to students as a Beta instance since September 11th along with a feedback survey for the project team to collect user experience feedback data. The project has seen significant progress in the last few months and below is more information about the product and our next steps.
Why Roundcube?
An environmental scan and subsequent research revealed Roundcube as a potential solution for UVic student email based on multiple criteria:
- Established and Supported – Roundcube has been available as a stable release since 2008 and there is a large community around the application. There is a solid history of releases and feature updates available for the tool and a new version in the making called “Roundcube Next” is in active development.
- Modern – Roundcube has fresh themes that allow users to engage with their email in an intuitive and straight-forward way. While many themes are available, thanks to it’s the large support community, even Roundcube’s most basic theme is eye-catching and usable.
- Dynamic – Some of the themes for the application are mobile device compatible which enables UVic to keep up with student expectations and modern smartphone capability.
Best of all – Roundcube is simple and integrates with hosting technologies that we already support.
Beta Testers Agree
Results from the Beta tester feedback survey are beginning to paint a positive picture of the student experience of Roundcube. Currently, 319 respondents have completed the survey in full and below are interim results from these participants.
| Strongly Disagree | Disagree | Neutral | Agree | Strongly Agree | |
| Webmail Beta is easy to use | 11
(3.4%) |
4
(1.3%) |
13
(4.1%) |
134
(42.0%) |
157
(49.2%) |
| I prefer Webmail Beta to the old webmail interface (webmail.uvic.ca) | 22
(6.9%) |
6
(1.9%) |
14
(4.4%) |
49
(15.4%) |
228
(71.5%) |
What’s Next?
In the new year the project team will implement a full rollout of Roundcube that will include CAS integration and automation of testing and installation. This phase of the project will also factor in the findings from the student feedback wherever possible. Ultimately, the goal of this project is for Roundcube to replace SquirrelMail as the student email client. This project is part of the ongoing commitment of University Systems offer UVic students a positive and effective computing experience.