Located in the heart of India's premier educational centre, the city of Pune, Symbiosis Centre for Distance Learning (SCDL) is a centre of excellence, offering quality distance education. But the institute’s hosted e-mail service was not user friendly, and took too much time and money to manage. To reduce spending, it decided to replace its aging, in-house student e-mail solution with a hosted solution. SCDL chose Microsoft® Live@edu, a set of free Web-based communication and collaboration services. Students are excited about the new solution’s reliability, as well as the ability to organize their communications in one place. The solution offers online storage with Windows Live™ SkyDrive. Students are using Live@edu to get better organized, and improve communications with their faculty.

The mission of one of the top public universities in the United States is to provide the best possible educational experience for its students through excellence in teaching, research and creative activity, and service to the state and society. As a part of that mission, the school’s IT team strives to offer students, faculty, and staff a secure and reliable communication solution that enhances the everyday activities that comprise university life. To improve e-mail capabilities for faculty and students, the university deployed a pilot of Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010. With this upgrade, the university will be able to benefit from increased performance and redundancy, reduced storage and backup costs, reduced compliance costs, and the ability to grow the communications network as the university population demands it.

Canada-based Georgian College offers degrees in fields such as business, engineering, and design. Previously, workers on its 11 campuses communicated mainly by e-mail or phone, hampering long-distance collaboration and isolating workers based on outlying campuses. Employees used a third-party conferencing service, but it required IT department assistance and administration. With help from Dell, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, Georgian College deployed Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 with voice over IP, instant messaging, presence awareness, and conferencing. Now, communication is more efficient. The college has eliminated its external conferencing service, saving U.S.$4,300 annually in conferencing costs, and it has reduced travel for a savings of $16,600 a year. Georgian College also has the potential to save about $215,000 by avoiding a Nortel voice-mail upgrade.

Brockenhurst College wanted to upgrade its e-mail service to provide online tools that students could use beyond the classroom. Microsoft® Live@edu fit the needs of students and the organisation by offering functionality that reflects the way students interact online but is appropriate for an educational setting. Now, almost every student in the college uses the e-mail system every day.

The Siberian University of Consumer Advocacy leverages Microsoft technologies and online services to build a modern, campus-wide communciations system for its 16,000 students and university staff. The new communications system, built on Microsoft SharePoint Server and Windows Live services, including Live@edu, among other Microsoft technologies, streamlines university management, lowers communications costs, and provides students and lecturers with a set of robst services that simplify interaction.

In 2007, the Russian Federation designated the Federal Agency for Education (FAE) to implement an order to “provide licensed support for standard software to be used in education institutions of the Russian Federation.” The FAE selected the Windows Vista® Business operating system as part of the “standard software” to be installed on all computers in public education institutions. The FAE turned to Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner IBS to manage and coordinate the activation of 80,000 licensed copies of Windows Vista to schools across Russia. Students and teachers now benefit from features such as the support of state-of-the-art audio-visual formats, the added functionality available to people with disabilities, and the enhanced security provided by Windows Vista.

To continue providing the latest learning tools for its students, Dubai Women’s College (DWC) needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure. Technology is an integral part of the college education and administration so the IT team needed to complete the migration during vacation. After the end of the academic year, IT administrators worked with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Exceed IT Services and completed the project in just four weeks.

Melbourne Business School (MBS) was founded in 1954 through the University of Melbourne. The school wanted to strategically align its brand positioning message, ‘Global. Business. Leaders.’, to every facet of its business. Its well intentioned but departmental approach to managing data on students (called ‘constituents’) hampered efforts to deliver services and develop relationships to a standard that was commensurate with its brand. In 2007 MBS began a comprehensive process of organisational change. It introduced a customer relationship management (CRM) system based on Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 4.0 and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. By introducing a common platform for data management and taking a life-cycle view of constituents, MBS improved communications with applicants, students, participants and alumni and projected a more professional image.

Manteca Unified School District (MUSD) covers a large rural area in Central California. MUSD needed to update its aging, non-standardized IT environment to save costs and help staff and students work more efficiently. MUSD standardized its infrastructure on productivity and IT management technologies found within the Microsoft® School Agreement that saved more than U.S.$1 million dollars in licensing fees. Despite budgetary limitations, MUSD is now able to provide unified communications, a district-wide collaborative infrastructure, and an optimized desktop environment where staff can share ideas and students have better access to educational applications. With centralized IT management tools and Microsoft hosted services, MUSD saves more than $100,000 in telephone and IT administrative costs.

The University of Kentucky is a full-service academic and research institution that serves 27,000 students on the Lexington campus and thousands more in remote locations across the state. To help professors and students communicate seamlessly and make the university’s resources cost-effective for its 44,000 users, the school’s IT staff is implementing Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 R2. By integrating presence, instant messaging, and audio, video, and Web conferencing into the school’s core educational, medical, and administrative applications, the university will streamline communications across the learning community. Using the innovative solution, the University of Kentucky will reduce travel costs and help its IT staff simplify a mixed communications infrastructure while reducing support costs.