Comments on: Choosing between Microsoft’s Live@edu and Google Apps for Education

By: E1n1verse » E-Mail in the Cloud: An Open University Survey

E1n1verse » E-Mail in the Cloud: An Open University Survey — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:11:55 +0000

[...] Apps for Education vs Microsoft’s Live@edu (3-part blog series): Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 (Thanks, Lynn, for Part 3 [...]

By: K. Walsh

K. Walsh — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:40:18 +0000

Thanks to both Raj and Kyle for their feedback and comments. This dialogue further illustrates the leap-frogging enhancement and expansion of each offering. A good problem to have for those of us who can benefit from either of these tool sets!

By: Raj

Raj — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 15:24:05 +0000

P.S. I work for Microsoft Live@edu

By: Raj

Raj — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:26:07 +0000

Kyle,
thanks for your comments – I am glad that Google Apps is working out for you.

Some comments based on your feedback above:

1. MS provides free solution to faculty, staff and students now (as of late 2008)

2. We have found most faculty and staff particularly like the Outlook interface, and MS web interface is also modeled on Outlook interface. Happy to discuss this further.

3. We try to balance “innovation” with “disruption” and change management. We have released 2 major versions of Outlook Live in the last 2 years, that addresses many of the concerns you raise yet we have done it in a controlled fashion that causes less disruption to the business productivity of school IT, teachers/faculty and students. We will continue to innovate and will certainly love any feedback on where we should improve – we view our innovation as a joint partnership with our customers.

4. We support a wide variety of OS and devices now (we definitely support Mac). But you are absolutely right that our web interface worked better with IE before – it is no longer the case now as of February-March 2009.

5. As the above article points out, we provide more storage than our competitors and will continue to evolve in this space. More importantly, Skydrive (online cloud storage) offers 25 GB of free storage, something that really resonates with many folks.

And of course, we are particularly focused on building a solution that respects school’s privacy and security – e.g., our web mail interface is secure by default as opposed to some of our competitors where we have to turn on security.

By: Kyle Johnson

Kyle Johnson — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:44:15 +0000

I’m the CTO at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC. We are nearly the end of our migration from Lotus Notes to Google Apps. We evaluated both (plus Zimbra) and chose Google for the following reasons (some of which may have changed since our evaluation):

1- Google provided faculty/staff accounts free as well, MS was charging for those (we migrated everyone, not just students). I think this is different now.

2- More of our students were already familiar with the Google interface

3- We liked Google’s “innovation curve.” They are constantly adding features and functions to the tools, and the pace felt quicker than with MS.

4- At the time the MS solution really worked best in IE. We’re a very cross platform school and didn’t like that. I think this may have changed too.

5- At the time MS offered much less storage. As you noted, that has changed, but I’m finding that Google adds space just a little bit slower than I use it. I never delete any email anymore, and I’m losing about 1% of my space per month. At that rate it will be 8 years before I reach my quota.

Folks interested in hearing more about our transition can email me at johnsonke@guilford.edu.