Seattle—It’s kind of a no-brainer: Hold Educause 2007, the huge technology showcase, in Seattle, and Microsoft, the hometown tech company, is going to get into the act.
On Tuesday, the software giant whisked a few hundred higher-ed technology types half an hour east from the downtown convention center (well, an hour if the traffic is bad), across Lake Washington, and into its Redmond headquarters. The goal: To show off Office Live Workspace, the latest addition to Microsoft Live@edu.
Live@edu is Microsoft’s integrated e-mail, calendar, and instant-messaging suite for colleges—oh, and don’t bother buying new servers, because the company will host everything for you on the Web. Now Microsoft has tacked on Office Live, another Web-based product that allows users to upload Word documents, PowerPoint slides, and Excel spreadsheets and share them with others via the Web. The big selling point so far: You won’t have to e-mail that term paper from one computer to another anymore. Just log on to the Web site and grab it. —Josh Fischman
