Microsoft Live@edu blog

 

·         Activity Panel.  A new activity panel shows all the activity in a workspace at a glance.

·         Notifications.  Students can now receive e-mail notifications about changes made to their workspaces or documents.

·         Direct links.  Students can now bookmark their workspace or a workspace item via a unique URL in a browser window.

·         Multi-file Upload.  Students can now upload several files simultaneously by simply dragging and dropping from their desktop.

·         Improved sharing.  New sharing functionality includes an easier user interface and auto-completion of e-mail addresses.

 

 

When we survey education customers around the world, the thing they ask for more than any other feature is more storage. Instead of students emailing files to themselves, educators want to give students a place to store files online for easy access from any computer, or just to have an archived version of it.

We're pleased to announce that we are increasing Windows Live SkyDrive - your password-protected USB drive in the sky - to 5 GB storage. This is available in 38 countries, effective Thursday, February 21. Now it's easier than ever to access your important files. In addition to Great Britain, India, and the U.S., we’re live in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey.

A really cool feature is the ability to drag and drop your files into your browser, as if SkyDrive was a folder on your computer.

You can sign up for your own personal SkyDrive by going to http://skydrive.live.com

When you're ready to sign up and give all of your students a 5 GB SkyDrive as part of the Live@edu program, accessible with their university email address and password, enroll your educational institution here.

 

If you've looked at Live@edu in the past, you noticed there was one primary way to deploy - using Identity Lifecycle Manager, a server that automates account creation and maintenance. This was a great solution for a lot of schools, because it is low cost and can be deployed without programming.

 

But some schools said "I don't want another server to manage" or "we don't have a lot of IT staff to manage this - can you make it easier?"

 

We love to develop new solutions, so we put our best programmers on this. They came back with THREE great ways to deploy.

Live@edu just keeps getting cooler! Today we announced that Office Live Workspace is joining the Live@edu suite of communication & collaboration tools. Check out the news release here.

 

What is Office Live Workspace? It's an online password-protected space where students can store over 1,000 documents and choose who to share them with. That's cool enough, but check this out - it doesn't matter if the people you're sharing with have Microsoft Office, or if they're using a Windows PC or a Mac. If you can access the web through a browser, you can work together on a Microsoft Word document stored on Office Live Workspace.

 

Since we're opening the Live@edu suite to Office Live Workspace (and other products in the future? Who knows?) we decided to change the name from "Windows Live@edu" to simply "Microsoft Live@edu".

 

We're going to be at Educause this week. Will you be there? Stop by booth #410 and learn how easy it is to set up a test account. We'll show you how.

 

 

The Live@edu team has been hard at work, developing new features based on the feedback of the many colleges and universities around the globe using the service.

 

5 GB inbox. This is an increase from 2 GB we offered before. Even though very few people used up the 2 GB we gave them, we will continue adding storage that it continues to be a non-issue.

 

Forwarding. This was a popular request and now we enable forwarding by default. Some schools may prefer to turn this feature off (since forwarded email can get blocked by other spam filters).

 

POP3 access. This was actually made available in May 2007, but most people don't know about that.  So we're announcing it again. :-)

 

SkyDrive. Now, every student gets 1 GB of password-protected online storage. Now it's like having your own personal USB drive in the sky. Hmmm...maybe that's why it's called "SkyDrive". Today, this is only available in the US, UK and India - and only in English. But I know the SkyDrive team is hard at work making it available in other countries. Stay tuned.

 

Outlook Connector. Very cool. Now you can access your Hotmail email, and your contacts, in a separate inbox in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. This is available in 12 languages. Even cooler.

 

Click here for all our recent upgrades.

 

Keep watching this space. If you drive by the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington you'll probably notice a few lights on late at night. That's us, working hard to bring you more innovative stuff you can use every day. Why not subscribe to our RSS feed so you know when this page gets updated.