Eastern Washington University

University Students Drive Adoption of Web Mail; 95 Percent Switch from Old Service

Located near Spokane, Eastern Washington University is one of the state’s fastest-growing public institutions. But the university’s hosted e-mail service was not user friendly, and the administration wanted to provide a better solution to help students stay in touch with peers and communicate with faculty. Students voted overwhelmingly to replace the existing e-mail service with Microsoft® Live@edu, a set of free communication and collaboration services hosted by Microsoft. Students like the familiar user interface of the Windows Live™ Hotmail® Web-based e-mail service, and the ability to choose their own user names and share calendars when arranging meetings. In the first two years, more than 6,500 accounts have been activated, totaling 65 percent of the campus population. By retiring the previous service, the university estimates it will save U.S.$70,000 over three years.

 

Situation

Founded in 1882, Eastern Washington University (Eastern) offers more than 100 fields of study and a low student-to-faculty ratio of 20 to 1. More than 66 percent of Eastern first-year students live on the university’s 300-acre campus, approximately 17 miles from Spokane, Washington. Eastern also offers degree programs in other Washington cities, including Bellevue, Everett, Kent, Seattle, Shoreline, Tacoma, Vancouver, and Yakima. Unique among the state’s regional universities, Eastern is home to seven fraternities and eight sororities.

At Eastern Washington University, Microsoft Live@edu is definitely a student-driven initiative. Our first two years have been so successful that the students are calling for the service to be mandatory. Matt Brown Student Technology Consultant, Eastern Washington University

While Eastern is well known for its close-knit community, its e-mail service had never been fully endorsed by the students as a means of communication. It was a hosted service from a local company, which provided an alias that reflected the host’s name, instead of the university’s name. Students were not able to choose their own user names, and they had only 25 megabytes of storage space in their inboxes. Only 17 percent of Eastern students chose to activate their e-mail accounts. The rest were using a variety of public Web mail services.

“We spent 50 cents per account per month for this service,” says Matt Brown, Student Technology Consultant at Eastern Washington University. “Our students weren’t happy with the clunky interface, and they wanted a familiar, easy-to-use Web mail solution instead of the POP3 [Post Office Protocol version 3] option that was available.”

The faculty and staff used a separate e-mail system that was incompatible with the one that the students used. The hosted service did not have a Safe Recipients list capability that would allow messages from university e mail addresses to pass through the host system’s junk e-mail filters. This meant that e-mail communication between students and faculty members was unreliable. “We offered the student e-mail service on a voluntary basis,” says Brown. “Many of them preferred to provide us with a forwarding address, but there was no consistency in what the students were using. The end result was that Eastern’s constituents did not have a shared, reliable method of communication.”

At Eastern, students pay a quarterly technology fee that amounts to approximately U.S.$1.2 million annually. The Student Technology Fee Committee decides, in consultation with Brown and three representatives from faculty, staff, and administration, which technology projects they will fund for that year. As Student Technology Consultant, Brown’s position is funded by this committee.

“The committee made a formal recommendation to replace our existing e-mail service with a more robust, Web-enabled solution,” says Brown. “After the committee made its recommendation, we took it to the student government body, called the Associated Students, which endorsed the proposal. I began looking for a replacement e-mail solution to fulfill the students’ directives. I knew I wanted another hosted solution, but it had to be reliable, easy to use, and flexible enough to allow students to choose their own user names.”

Solution

In spring 2005, when Brown began evaluating e-mail solutions for Eastern Washington University, he learned about the Microsoft® Live@edu  program that provides universities with a free set of hosted communication services for students and alumni. Students receive a Windows Live™ Hotmail® Web-based e-mail account with a university address and user name that they select. Other collaboration services include Windows Live Messenger for multistudent instant-messaging conversations and Windows Live Spaces for sharing documents, photos, and blogs.

Even though the Live@edu program was still in beta, Brown decided to present it to the Student Technology Fee Committee. “I felt the students would adopt Microsoft Live@edu because I knew a lot of them were already familiar with the Hotmail service. Microsoft has been offering Hotmail for many years, which assured me that the service would be reliable and well supported. When I presented the new program to the students, they loved the fact that the user interface looked familiar, unlike the existing e-mail service. It was an easy sale.”

Deploying Quickly
Microsoft offers a variety of deployment options to fit customer needs. Brown chose to deploy the Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003 provisioning solution, although he did not integrate it with the university’s Active Directory® directory service, a central component of the Windows Server® 2003 operating system. Instead, Brown used the Microsoft Live@edu application programming interface to write a small program to allow students to choose their own e-mail user names. “Any Web database programmer could do this easily,” he says.

The program checks each student’s choice against an e-mail name database to see if it’s already taken and then passes it along to Identity Integration Server. “It took only a couple of days to set up Identity Integration Server 2003 and create the first batch of accounts, and after that the provisioning process went smoothly. It was an easy rollout that took only about one-quarter of my job time,” says Brown.

Driving Adoption
Eastern decided to offer Microsoft Live@edu as an option and, for the first year, ran the new e-mail solution as well as the previous service. First-year students attending orientation in summer 2005 had the opportunity to sign up for Microsoft Live@edu right away. Returning students were directed to the university portal where they could log in to their main student account, choose a user name, and activate a new e-mail account.

“During the first six months, we sent out three e-mail messages to students using the previous service, telling them of the cutoff date and how to migrate to our new hosted solution,” says Brown. “We trained students at the student help desk to assist in making the change. At the end of the first year, we went back to the Student Technology Fee Committee and asked it to confirm the continued use of the program.”

Fourth-year student Evan Buelt chaired the committee at the time. “It was an easy decision for us because we had received no negative feedback during that year,” he recalls. “The students voted overwhelmingly to continue with Microsoft Live@edu.”

Benefits

Since deploying Microsoft Live@edu, Eastern Washington University is enjoying the benefits of a reliable, hosted e-mail solution with a familiar user interface that students are quickly integrating into their academic and social lives. With Live@edu, the Eastern IT department can provide the superior communication and collaboration services explicitly mandated by the students, at a lower cost than the previous e-mail service. And because the Live@edu program offers a range of services and is continually developing new ones, Eastern can take advantage of the growing suite of hosted services for its students.

“At Eastern Washington University, Microsoft Live@edu is definitely a student-driven initiative,” says Brown. “Our first two years have been so successful that the students are calling for the service to be mandatory.”

Enthusiastic Adoption
From the outset, student adoption of the new service has been enthusiastic. After introducing the solution for the fall 2005 quarter, more than 95 percent of the approximately 1,700 students who used the previous e-mail service switched to Microsoft Live@edu within the first month. By December 2005, more than 2,200 accounts had been activated. The following year, an additional 2,600 accounts were added. Today, even though the solution is still voluntary, about 65 percent of Eastern students are using the service, compared with the 17 percent that used the previous e mail service.

In his current position as President of the Associated Students, Buelt hears firsthand his fellow students’ comments on the new service. He’s not surprised at their endorsement of Microsoft Live@edu. “Microsoft Live@edu provides a legitimate e-mail solution—from the students, by the students—that shows our affiliation with the university. It provides us a better sense of connection to everyone on campus.”

Improved Features
The ability to choose their own e-mail user names ranks high on the list of students’ favorite features. In addition, students enjoy increased inbox storage size of 5 gigabytes, one-click control over unwanted e-mail messages, and the ability to send attachments of up to 10 megabytes. The Microsoft Live@edu program also is more reliable because Brown has created a Safe Recipients list so e-mail messages sent from the university’s mail servers are not caught in the program’s junk e-mail filters.

“Now I can communicate reliably with my professors using an e-mail address that shows I’m a legitimate Eastern student,” Buelt says. “And I really like how I can customize my user name to reflect personal affiliations on campus.” Buelt has two e-mail addresses with the eagles.ewu.edu alias. One user name reflects his membership in the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, where all 90 members have chosen the Microsoft Live@edu e-mail service. The other user name reflects his position within the student government.

Using shared calendars makes it a lot easier to arrange meetings with other students, faculty, and administration. Windows Live Hotmail really helps keep my student government activities organized. Evan Buelt President, Associated Students, Eastern Washington University

It’s within his role as student president that Buelt is taking advantage of the shared calendar feature available in Windows Live Hotmail. “Sometimes, I have between five and six hours of meetings a day,” he reports. “Using shared calendars makes it a lot easier to arrange meetings with other students, faculty, and administration. Windows Live Hotmail really helps keep my student government activities organized.”

Alumni Participation
“The ability to choose their e-mail user name was an attractive feature with our students that led us to consider the alumni,” says Brown. “I got the sense that if students could choose their e-mail user name, they were more likely to use the e-mail address for life. The Microsoft Live@edu program would provide a consistent, reliable way to stay in touch with our alumni. Right now, we rely on mailings. We plan on introducing Microsoft Live@edu to our alumni when our alumni association gets its contact database up and running.”

Buelt is definitely going to take one of his Microsoft Live@edu e-mail addresses with him when he graduates in 2008. “I will have been using this e-mail address for three years by the time that I graduate, and I don’t want to lose that connection with my classmates or the campus,” he says. “Plus, I think it will be a real asset when looking for work. It will look more professional if I can present myself as a legitimate Eastern graduate.”

Supportive Partnership
Lately, Brown has been fielding calls from other universities and colleges that are interested in the Microsoft Live@edu program. He cites the supportive relationship the university has enjoyed with Microsoft, and the program’s software-plus-services delivery model that eliminates worry about system maintenance and reliability, as two key benefits that prospective participants can look forward to.

“During deployment … the Microsoft team [was] extremely helpful,” Brown recalls. “Today, we are working in partnership with Microsoft to enhance the solution, and Microsoft has taken some of our ideas and integrated them into the program. And we can beta-test new services that Microsoft is adding to the program and give feedback, which is always advantageous. For example, we are interested in Windows Live SkyDrive, which offers students 1 gigabyte of protected online storage for documents.”

Compared with Eastern’s existing faculty and staff e-mail system that requires up to four full-time employees, Microsoft Live@edu is virtually maintenance free. “Once the service is up and running, there’s very little to do,” says Brown. “We estimate that we will save $70,000 over three years in e-mail service costs. The bottom line is, with Microsoft Live@edu, we can better provide hosted Web mail and online collaboration services for our students, while saving money.”
 
Microsoft Live@edu
The Microsoft Live@edu program provides institutions of higher education and K-12 with a set of free hosted and cobranded collaboration and communication services for students, alumni, and applicants. Offerings include a choice of Windows Live Hotmail or Microsoft Exchange Labs for e-mail, and Microsoft Office Live Workspace, an online space to collaborate on Microsoft Office documents.

For more information about Live@edu, go to:
get.liveatedu.com

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about Eastern Washington University, call (509) 359-6200 or visit the Web site at:
www.ewu.edu