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Windows Live on Campus: Powering College Communication |
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REDMOND, Wash., April 21, 2006 – For three years, administrators at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland had been trying to outsource the student e-mail system but couldn’t find a way to do it cost effectively. They asked students to provide their MSN Hotmail addresses as an alternative, but students wanted addresses with the university’s domain name – caledonian.ac.uk – in order to be taken seriously when communicating with people outside the university.
Something had to be done. The university’s existing Web-based e-mail system was swamped and couldn’t handle the traffic generated by 15,000 students. The university was seeing 4,000 students enter each fall, rapidly increasing the load on the already overstressed system. A new state-of-the-art e-mail system – "kids are pretty discerning, if the product isn’t up-to-the-minute, they’re not interested," says Les Watson, the university’s Pro-Vice Chancellor – would be a significant expense. And Watson wasn’t that thrilled to be in the e-mail business to begin with, since he regarded it as the type of "commodity operation' that distracted the university from its core functions.
"We had a problem," says Watson. “We took it to Microsoft and they solved it for us."
Junk Filters, Virus Protection, Calendar, Address Book – and 2 Gigabytes
In January, the university began rolling out e-mail accounts with its domain name to all 15,000 students and plans to offer the service to its alumni as well. Students aren’t likely to bump up against mailbox limits; the e-mail accounts, now based on MSN Hotmail, each come with a 250MB mailbox and will grow to 2GB when students are switched to Microsoft’s new Windows Live Mail later this year. The e-mail service also brings the features Watson’s discerning students demand – advanced junk e-mail filtering, antivirus protection tools, calendar and an address book.
Along with the e-mail service came a big bonus. Using the same ID, the university is also deploying Windows Live Messenger so students and staff can keep in touch with free audio and video conversation features as well as text messaging; MSN Spaces for participants to share blogs and build communities; and MSN Alerts so the university can notify students of special events. Students can access their e-mail wirelessly from smart phones and Pocket PCs – a major benefit given the ubiquity of mobile devices among students and the freedom those devices give them to send and retrieve e-mail without returning to a desktop computer. And Glasgow Caledonian University didn’t have to purchase an expensive e-mail system – because Microsoft is providing and hosting this service.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 27 April 2006 )
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