University adopts web-based email solution for students

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 17 March 2009 19:48

IT Industry - Deals

Students at Queensland’s University of Technology (QUT) now have a new service for communication and collaboration amongst themselves with the university’s announcement that it’s adopting Microsoft’s Live@Edu web-based email solution.

QUT’s Deputy Vice Chancellor for the Technology, Information and Learning Support, Professor Tom Cochrane, says the university began evaluating the costs and benefits of providing a hosted web-based email solution for students when existing email infrastructure reached its limit of functionality and storage capacity.

Professor Cochrane said the University carefully considered various options and the Microsoft solution was the culmination of discussions involving students, university administration and representatives of Microsoft and included an opt-in trial involving students from the Faculty of Information Technology.

“The service offers our students the advantage of a greatly increased mailbox capacity and attachment file size, a useful calendar, plus a number of improvements in related services, while retaining their identity as QUT students in their email addresses.
 
“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.”  

Professor Cochrane said the suite of innovative online applications and services included Microsoft Outlook Live, Microsoft Office Live Workspace and SkyDrive storage, and during the current semester the university’s 40,000 students would have access to the suite of applications and services.
 
One QUT student, Joyi Lu said the email system was extremely easy to use and had a familiar interface. “
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