2 page Case Study - Posted 10/17/2007

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University of Pennsylvania

Ivy League School Outsources Web Mail; 40 Percent of Students Switch in 4 Months

Undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania College of Arts and Sciences were dissatisfied with their school’s e-mail service. School administrators and students decided to offer the option of using Windows Live™ @ edu. The free hosted communication and collaboration services from Microsoft provide the storage space, messaging, calendaring, and file-sharing tools that students expect. So far, thousands of undergrads have converted.

Business Needs

The University of Pennsylvania (Penn) is a historic, Ivy League university that regularly ranks among the top 10 in the annual U.S. News & World Report survey of U.S. universities. Penn has four undergraduate schools and is home to nearly 10,000 students. Of these, the College of Arts and Sciences (the College) has approximately 6,500 undergrads.

Because the College is part of the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS), these undergraduates are assigned an @sas e-mail alias. They used Penn’s Internet standards–based e mail service along with a commonly used Web mail service called IMP. However, these services were hosted on an aging UNIX-based server computer with spotty reliability. According to Ira Winston, Chief Information Officer at SAS, this system was no longer meeting students’ needs.

“Students are clear about what they want from their communications platform, and it’s a lot more than e-mail,” Winston says. “Social networking and blogging are now an integral part of their lives on campus and off. Our e-mail service looked old-fashioned and had only 75 megabytes of storage space per user. I was also worried about e-mail disaster recovery capabilities.”

More than 30 percent of the College students forwarded their e-mail to other personal e-mail accounts, and a growing number of these students were strongly suggesting that the school move to a better e-mail service. “We were at a crossroads,” recalls Winston. “Either we replaced the existing system, or we found an externally hosted solution.”

Solution

The University of Pennsylvania decided to find an outsourced e-mail offering. “Like most universities, we felt that outside providers could deliver superior services,” says Winston. “More than 90 percent of our students already use these services, so if we were to continue providing internally hosted services, they would have to be better to get the students to switch. Also, free hosted services would allow us to redirect our IT resources to more strategic initiatives.”

About 40 percent of College freshmen chose to use the Penn Live messaging solution as compared with 20 percent choosing Google. Ira Winston Chief Information Officer, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania

“We felt that Microsoft would be the more responsive partner in tailoring future products to meet our needs,” says Winston. “And it wasn’t difficult to integrate Windows Live @ edu into our campus authentication service.”

With a Windows Live @ edu package, students use the Live Hotmail® web-based e-mail service, including features like shared calendar, access to e-mail from mobile phones, and spam filtering. Students can also use Windows Live Messenger to chat via text, voice, or video, and Windows Live Spaces to collaborate, blog, and post photos.

Penn co-branded the solution as Penn Live and offered it to students as a new mail forwarding option. Existing students received an e-mail invitation to sign up for a Penn Live account with a link to a Web site with an exhaustive frequently asked questions (FAQ) page, a student blog, and a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed for notices about Penn Live. Adds Winston, “Eventually, we expect to be able to retire our old Web mail service, which will result in substantial savings and free up the school’s resources for other priorities.”

Benefits

The University of Pennsylvania has experienced an impressive adoption rate among the 6,500 College undergrads. “Between spring and fall of 2007, we have gone from 70 percent of our students using our old Web mail service down to 19 percent,” Winston reports. “About 40 percent of College freshmen chose to use the Penn Live messaging solution as compared with 20 percent choosing Google.”

Fulfilling Student Expectations

With Windows Live @ edu, Penn has a set of communication and collaboration services, with disaster recovery built in, that meets its technologically savvy students’ expectations. Students are ecstatic about having approximately 66 times more storage space, increased reliability, and an improved interface. “[Penn Live offers] lots of storage, doesn’t break down all the time, and allows me to create folders to organize my mail,” reported a first-year student in a recent survey. “And I love the contact management.”

Using Penn Live, students have a reliable e mail service with extra capabilities and an e-mail address that reflects the student’s university connection. “I like the calendar feature and that it is an @upenn.edu e-mail address,” said a sophomore in the survey. “This is nice when I am sending official e mail to people outside of the Penn community, such as employers.”

Establishing a Long-Term Partnership

Penn chose Windows Live @ edu because of the flexible, long-term partnership offered by Microsoft. “Not all universities are the same, and we felt that Microsoft went out of its way to be flexible about our unique approach to deployment,” says Winston. “The company even sent out people to train our student advisors on supporting the new service.”

For Penn, Windows Live @ edu is just the beginning of a new era of student-friendly campus messaging and collaboration services. “We are excited to work with Microsoft on the pilot for Microsoft Office Live Workspace, which we believe will be a very popular product because it integrates with Microsoft Office programs,” says Winston. “We are looking forward to offering this great new service to our students.”