Flinders University and TAFE South Australia have inked separate deals with Microsoft to replace their current student email systems with the Redmond giant’s Live@edu product.
Both educational institutions will deploy Live@edu next year.
TAFE South Australia is the larger of the two deals, covering some 80,000 staff and students. Flinders’ deployment will cover “more than 16,000 undergraduate and post-graduate students”, according to a statement from Microsoft.
Flinders University started looking at email products in late 2008. Live@edu replaced an in-house open source system.
The University said it also planned to replace its staff email service. It “decided to deploy an in-house Microsoft Exchange solution following a formal evaluation process”, the statement said.
“Outsourcing these services for students reduces the resources the University needs to provide while delivering significantly enhanced services to students at no cost to them – in short, a win-win situation,” the University’s manager of infrastructure services Dean Gawler said.
In addition to providing students with an email solution, other features available through Live@edu include: Windows Live Messenger and file sharing, Windows Live Spaces for personal web publishing, blogging and photo sharing and FolderShare, a private peer-to-peer network that allows users to synchronise files between multiple devices and share files with other student users.
Flinders is the 11th university in Australia to have selected the Microsoft Live@edu solution for students.
