Microsoft, Google pitching cloud to educators

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 17 March 2009 06:49

Business IT - Networking

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has moved away from running its own student email servers, and has instead adopted Microsoft's Live@edu service.

You might have thought that a University of Technology would have the skills and scale to manage its own email, but apparently not.

Live@edu is specifically for student use, but if the underlying service is so good you might also wonder why QUT isn't moving is academic and general staff onto a an equivalent hosted platform.

In addition to email, Live@edu provides calendars, instant messaging, web space, and file synchronisation and sharing.

Students can keep their email addresses after graduation.

"The Live@edu service offers our students the advantage of a greatly increased mailbox capacity [10G] and attachment file size [20M], a useful calendar, plus a number of improvements in related services, while retaining their identity as QUT students in their email addresses," said Tom Cochrane, deputy vice chancellor for the division of technology, information and learning support. 

“As well as enhanced services to students, the University will benefit by having automated service upgrades, and better scalability and availability by deploying this software as a service offering from Microsoft.”

40,000 QUT students will be able to use the Live@edu suite this semester.

So what of Google?

It's promoting the way schools in New Zealand are using Google Docs for administrative and educational purposes, including budgeting, scheduling (eg, primary students creating their own timetables for class presentations), collecting feedback (eg, peer feedback concerning those presentations and after-school care), and populating the school's external web site.

The free Google Apps Education Edition includes hosted email, messaging, calendaring, word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets.