Educause '09: live@edu

I went along to a Microsoft presentation on live@edu, which is the off-premise, hosted email service which we’re going to be delivering to our students early in 2010. Since we’re already some way into the project to manage this transition, there wasn’t a lot in the presentation which I didn’t already have some dim awareness of, but there were a few interesting points:-

• Online, hosted Sharepoint is going to be added to the live@edu offering in 2010. It’ll be free for students, chargeable for staff, with the possibility of additional paid-for support if you want it. It won’t be as feature-rich as on-premise Sharepoint, but (depending on what’s in and what’s out) that might not matter for some student purposes. More information here (and I love the almost-too-frank FAQs; “Q: Aren’t you just copying Google? A: No! No way! We were here first!”)
• Moving student email accounts over via IMAP looks pretty do-able .
• The tech guys I spoke to seemed very confident that it is possible to do single sign-on integration with our Shibboleth-based in-house system. We might need our email or directories team to add some extra stuff to an AD and/or stick a special certificate on one of their AD servers, but given that, the rest of it, they say, is possible. Could just be sales talk, but the people I spoke to seemed too much in love with the geeky details of how you’d do it to be sales guys. ;-)
• There’s a Windows Explorer add-on which lets you see your Skydrive file store as if it were locally attached storage (well, almost; you can drag files into and out of it and do file operations on the remote system in Windows Explorer, but it’s a network place, not a drive letter mapping, so it doesn’t show up directly in Open and Save dialogs, which is a shame). Still, makes it much more workable to have larger file sets in Skydrive, and much easier to move stuff in and out. It’s slightly surprising that it’s a third party offering rather than a Microsoft one.

John Dale : 04 Nov 2009 22:30 |  Tags: Educause09 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem