Orlando, Fla. — Cloud computing is very much in the air here at the Educause educational-technology meeting. Everyone is talking about the benefits of using software kept someplace on the Web, rather than on your desktop.
Everyone, that is, but Anthony Salcito, Microsoft’s general manager for U.S. public-sector education. “We want people to have the best of both worlds,” he said over lunch here. “Flexibility is key. We want scientists to be able to start a Word document in a shared workspace with colleagues in a cloud, and then get on an airplane, where they don’t have access to the Web, and finish it on a laptop.”
So Microsoft is offering extensions of its Office suite to do just that. The company has also created a cloud-based program called Live Mesh. With the free service, people can synchronize files on a Web site with those on their PCs’ desktops, their Macs, their iPhones, and any other devices that can connect to the Internet. The company also unveiled a development tool, Azure, to allow other companies to create applications to link on-campus software with off-campus, Web-based software.
Microsoft is banking on the familiarity people have with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote (presentation software that many professors use for lectures). When those programs come with stickers telling people that they can, for no extra charge, use the same applications to share some documents on the Web and to keep other documents safe on their desktops, the company hopes to sell even more shrink-wrapped boxes of software.
And it’s ad-free software, says Mr. Salcito, in an apparent swipe at a rival, Google Apps for Education The Google offering is a cloud-based suite of software with operations supported, as much of the search-engine giant’s operations are, by ads sold against search terms.
It is, of course, getting a bit crowded in the clouds, with everyone offering something for the student, professor, or administrator on the go. Both Microsoft and Google now have to go up against AT&T and the iPhone. AT&T and Apple are both taking aim at mobile campus computing.
At Educause, AT&T handed out a $10,000 scholarship and free iPhones to some Stanford University students who won its “Big Mobile on Campus” contest. The students formed a company called Terribly Clever to develop something called “iStanford,” a suite that allows students (those enrolled at the Palo Alto institution, at least) to add or drop courses, view university bills, schedule courses in a particular major, and get updates on varsity sports. The application is available through Apple’s iTunes store. —Josh Fischman
