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May 27, 2008, 11:53 AM ET
Microsoft Ramps Up Its Free College E-Mail Program
Microsoft has decided to enlarge a service of keen interest to colleges, even as the company last week dumped another offering used by higher education, its Live Search Books program. Now Live@edu, the free Web-based e-mail and online collaboration program for students and alumni, is getting much larger inboxes, the ability to handle bigger attached files, true shared calendars, and the chance for colleges to block student e-mail containing words they deem offensive, the company announced today.
Tired of the 5 gigabyte inbox? Live@edu now offers accounts with 10 gigabytes, and the capacity to handle attachments up to 20 megabytes in size, says Bruce Gabrielle, senior product manager for the service. The boost is because the company has decided that, in addition to handing campuses Microsoft Hotmail accounts (with university-based e-mail addresses), it will offer accounts on the more powerful Microsoft Exchange Web access system. That gives users access to Windows programs like Outlook, with e-mail, full calendars, and a contact list.
It’s a solution used by many businesses, and Microsoft has been quietly offering it, in a form called Exchange Labs, to a few educational institutions since last fall. Drexel University, Hinds Community College, and the Colorado Community College system are some that have tried it.
With Exchange Labs, users at the same university can see one another’s calendars to set up meetings. E-mail tracking is enabled, so students can see whether a term paper was delivered to a professor’s inbox. They can also push e-mail to cell phones. (And they can use Exchange to wipe data from those phones if they happen to lose them.) Exchange Labs also gives university officials the ability to set up filters, like spam filters, for offensive terms in e-mail, though Mr. Gabrielle says he wasn’t sure what words, if any, that universities have tried placing on a “do not type” list.
At this point the service is not being offered to faculty members or administrators. “I think it’s a business model decision,” Mr. Gabrielle said, noting that the company may need to figure out whether it wants to allow ads on Web pages seen by those users; the student and alumni service is ad-free. —Josh Fischman
Categories: Leadership
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