Click on a topic below to read the questions and answers.
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1. What kind of reporting is available for Live@edu administrators?
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Live@edu administrators can access key reports about their school's service activity via the Service Management Portal.
Reports include:
- Account Trends - Number of provisioned and active accounts for your domain.
- Account Activity Summary - Number of accounts within your domain that received, sent or had failed messages.
- Message Activity - Number of received, sent or failed messages for your domain.
- Service Usage Trend - Trend charts for service usage.
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2. Do I have to deploy all of my students and alumni, or can I pilot with just a few on an opt-in basis?
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You can deploy with all of your students and alumni or faculty and staff, just a few, or just one. There are no minimums or maximums.
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3. Why would a school want to use ILM?
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Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) is ideal for schools that want automated directory synchronization with on premise student directories or other student information systems and for schools that want to leverage an existing MIIS or ILM server.
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4. Is there a way I can host my e-mail with Microsoft without having to buy ILM?
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Yes, we offer several alternative approaches that do not require any software purchase. Check out
this page
for more information about the various deployment scenarios.
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5. Is Microsoft Live@edu easy to deploy for the Education institution?
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Yes, we have several deployment options and we supply detailed documentation and support for all. Check out
this page.
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6. Why would students want to use Microsoft Live@edu?
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Students need to collaborate with friends, classmates, and family and they have a variety of online tools, from different sources, to choose from. Microsoft Live@edu is a single resource with multiple tools that students can access with one e-mail account for a consistent user experience. It is a free offering for schools based on e-mail through Microsoft Outlook Live, with access to other services such as Microsoft SkyDrive. This service gives students, staff, and faculty the power to choose how they communicate and collaborate with the people and communities around them. Also, because schools customize Live@edu e-mail with their branding, students feel connected with their academic community.
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7. What's the catch? Will Live@edu users see advertisements?
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Microsoft commits that students will NOT see third party ads in the user interface of the email service. Additionally, third party ads will be turned off automatically for all Windows Live Services except Windows Live Messenger.
However, Microsoft does reserve the right to display information about Microsoft products and services with recognition of the need to do so in a manner that is tasteful and not overbearing. For example, Live@edu “tips and tricks” may be shown to enhance usage of Windows Live services.
Alumni, applicants/trial users and other non-student users of Live@edu will see banner advertisements for third-party products. Microsoft will ensure that third-party advertisements are family-safe and follow their creative acceptance policy
(http://advertising.microsoft.com/creative-acceptance-policy).
Additionally: Microsoft does not scan e-mail content for targeting ads, allow behavioral targeting of advertisements, or attach commercial taglines to the bottom of e-mails.
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8. Is Live@edu available outside United States?
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Yes. Live@edu is currently deployed in more than 100 countries around the world in thousands of educational institutions.
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9. Will the education institution be able to use their own branding with Live@edu services?
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Yes. Schools can customize the look and feel of Live@edu services to reflect their organization's brand. For example, schools can add school specific logo to reflect school brand as well as school specific links to the e-mail interface to help discover other school services/sites such as library or registrar's office.
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10. What services are included in Live@edu?
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Student Email + Calendar: Equip your students with student email and calendar tools similar to what they may use in the workforce. Live@edu includes Microsoft Outlook Live (10GB/user), a co-branded Exchange solution at no cost. (Windows Live Hotmail is only available to customers in China.)
Collaboration Tools: Online services to store, share and edit documents. Microsoft SkyDrive - free online storage.
Communication Tools: Enhance your students' online and mobile experience, and allow them to personalize it with these communication tools. Windows Live Messenger - One of the world’s most popular IM clients lets students do more than just chat.
In addition, users can access other Windows Live services such as Windows Live spaces to better collaborate or Windows Live photo gallery to better express their ideas.
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11. Is Live@edu available for my faculty and staff?
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Yes. Live@edu is available for faculty, staff, students and alumni of any educational institution.
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12. How many schools are using Live@edu?
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Thousands of educational institutions in more than 100 countries around the world use Live@edu services, accounting for tens of millions of users.
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13. Is Live@edu available for my institution?
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Live@edu is available to any educational institution and its users, including students, faculty, staff and alumni.
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14. Live@edu is free, but is there is some cost to the school?
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Live@edu is offered at no cost to the institution. If schools want to automate account management, they can purchase server software from Microsoft, discounted especially for the Live@edu program, but there’s no requirement to purchase a server.
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15. How do I enroll?
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Learn how easy it is to set up hosted email and free online storage services at your school with Live@edu. Check out the Live@edu
enrollment page
to view the five steps to get started and watch an enrollment overview video.
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16. What is Live@edu?
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Live@edu is a no-cost e-mail and collaboration services, co-branded for schools. Microsoft Live@edu is a platform that supports the collaborative campus of the 21st century. Outlook Live e-mail service provides the familiar and reliable Outlook Web Access (OWA) co-branded with your school’s name and logo for students and alumni. And it’s more than just e-mail. Live@edu includes access to other programs and services that increase your school’s ability to collaborate and communicate, including calendars, document sharing, shared workspaces, blogs, instant messaging, video chat, mobile e-mail and document access, and address books.
With 10 gigabytes (GB) of e-mail storage and free online file storage, your students can participate in online tutorials, collaborate on assignments, discuss ideas with faculty, and build lifelong relationships with your educational institution. Live@edu is accessible through popular Web browsers for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems—and it’s not only free, it’s easy for you to set up and administer.
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17. What is Microsoft really trying to do here? Make money through advertising?
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No, our goal is much broader - Microsoft offers Live@edu to educational institutions at no cost to the institution as part of Microsoft's overall vision for the education sector and our Software and Services vision. Outlook Live offers most of the end user features available in Exchange Server and prepares students to familiarize themselves with tools they are likely to encounter in their future workforce. Our goal is to introduce our services to students who are beginning to form online habits, discover that these services help reduce the time it takes to finish coursework while at the same time helping them stay connected with friends and family, have them fall in love with them, and use them for life. At the same time, we are helping schools around the world connect students, faculty, staff and alumni to access email and documents on their desktop, mobile phone or online.
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18. How is Live@edu managed, by the school or by Microsoft?
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Email addresses are provisioned by the school, just as they do today. Schools continue to create, distribute, and delete accounts. However, with an easy-to-use web management interface accessible from multiple browsers, Live@edu reduces the time spent in managing school e-mail services. At the same time, Microsoft manages the hosting, including server uptime, spam- and virus-filtering, and data backup. So Live@edu helps reduce both the school's infrastructure cost and frees the IT department to take on other strategic initiatives.
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19. Do institutions need regular Microsoft Office licenses to use Live@edu?
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Schools do not need Office licenses to use Live@edu. Students can use SkyDrive free, pursuant to our standard consumer terms (Windows Live Service Agreement). Students can create and save Office documents in the cloud and share/edit them with other students, for example, without having Office installed. Students can also create and store other types of documents – besides Office documents – in the cloud, and they can also create Web-based documents, called “notes,” without having Office installed. If a person saves an Office document to the cloud, others can view the document and make comments, even if they don’t have Office installed on their machine. With Office Web Applications in SkyDrive, students can further enhance their online experience with web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that complement the client versions. So, a student could create a term-paper on her Windows PC in her dorm room and quickly edit it on a Linux machine in the school lab even though the Linux machine does not have Office installed.
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20. Can parents have Live@edu accounts too?
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Yes, parents may also be issued Live@edu accounts. Please note that parent accounts will see advertisements similarly to alumni accounts.
An alternative approach for parental communication is to create "contacts" for the parents in the global address list within Outlook Live. This is the recommended approach in instances where the parents are unlikely to check their Live@edu mailbox and prefer communication with their existing email address. In this setup, a contact would show up in the global address list but any mail sent would be forwarded to an alternate SMTP address (or the parents primary email address). These contacts can also be added to distribution groups (i.e. PTA distribution group).
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21. Can I deploy with alumni only?
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Yes, schools can deploy Live@edu to students, faculty, staff or alumni -- or only to alumni. See Live@edu
Case Studies
for an example of how Ball State University deployed Live@edu to over 160,000 alumni and parents.
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22. Why is Live@edu important for my school?
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Shrinking budgets and growing requirements are just two of the challenges you face each year. You need technology solutions that meet the changing needs of your school, educators and students. By allowing Microsoft to host your student email and collaboration services, you can provide your end users with the latest technology while reducing costs. Microsoft Live@edu allows you to provide an easy, powerful experience for your students and teachers with the IT flexibility and control necessary in an educational environment.
Microsoft and Live@edu will help your school build the next generation's workforce. The world of work and the physical boundaries of collaboration are changing. Students benefit today with anywhere access to familiar productivity and collaboration tools, and also down the road with a competitive advantage entering the workforce.
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23. Why is Live@edu important for students?
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Students are coming to schools more technologically savvy than before. They expect their school environments to have rich, high-quality communications capabilities like those available to them in non-academic settings. Live@edu puts a no-cost yet familiar email and document management and sharing service at the tip of the students’ fingertips allowing them to communicate and collaborate easily with their fellow students and seamlessly incorporate their digital lifestyle with their academic work style.
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24. Why is Live@edu important to Microsoft?
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"Software plus services" (seamless connection of devices/software with the Web) is Microsoft’s vision for the future; and Live@edu is an expression of that vision. We are seeing several trends.
First, the explosion in Internet access and broadband access means more of the content that used to be stored on a single device will now be stored in the cloud and accessed from multiple devices.
Second, the proliferation of devices – laptops, mobile devices – means there are more ways to connect, and a greater need to synchronize documents/information across multiple devices. This is especially true for schools, where students are some of the earliest adopters of things like mobile devices and online services.
Live@edu is in synch with these trends and is an expression of Microsoft’s software plus services vision. It allows students to connect with each other and share information from multiple devices using communication and collaboration tools.
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25. Will schools be able to choose the e-mail domain for their students and alumni?
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Yes, the institution can choose one or more domains. So, students could be in students.school.edu domain while alumni could be in alumni.school.edu
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26. What additional services do you anticipate offering in the future?
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Microsoft is announcing the addition of new SharePoint Online based collaboration and productivity services tailored for students at educational institutions as part of the no-cost Live@edu online service. Based on the next version of SharePoint Online, these new services will start to become available to customers starting in the second half of 2010.
In addition, our roadmap includes a number of exciting new web-based services for educators, students, and IT administrators. Microsoft is also proactively pursuing the notion of software plus services, meaning that the roadmaps for many of our products and services include innovative and robust services components.
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27. I would like to have a trial account for my school.
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28. When configuring Live@edu Trial Account, my domain name will not take over my current email system, correct?
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Correct, the trial will not take over the school’s current email system. Instead, a new system will be created for pilot.
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29. Right now it’s free and not ad-supported. Will that change?
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Microsoft offers Live@edu to educational institutions at no cost to the institution as part of Microsoft's overall vision for the education sector and our Software and Services vision. Outlook Live offers most of the end user features available in Exchange Server and exposes students to tools they are likely to encounter in their future workforce. Our goal is to introduce our services and productivity tools to students who are beginning to form online and desktop computing habits, discover that these services help reduce the time they time they take to finish coursework while at the same time helping them stay connected with friends and family, have them fall in love with them, and use them for life. At the same time, we are helping schools around the world connect students, faculty, staff and alumni to access email and documents on their desktop, mobile phone or online.
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30. What type of support does Live@edu offer for IT Administrators?
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Live@edu offers free support and management tools to school IT administrators. The Live@edu Service Management Portal and online Support Community are available to Live@edu administrators in addition to 24x7 online and telephone support.
For more information, see
this page
.
In addition to our valuable free support for Live@edu, a paid support offering will be added in the future to provide an even higher level of support to our educational institutions around the world.
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31. What type of support does Live@edu offer for end users?
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Online support tools are available to end users for all Live@edu services.
http://help.outlook.com provides customers self-help for Outlook Live.
http://support.live.com provides customer self help for all of Windows Live Services properties, including Windows Live Hotmail.
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32. I'm a Microsoft Partner. Where can I go for more information on Live@edu?
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33. Can I trust Microsoft with my school's data?
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Yes, Microsoft is committed to the security and privacy of your school's data. We apply enterprise-grade standards and processes that have come with 30+ years of experience. Live@edu securely stores data with multiple datacenters around the world and does not show 3rd party ads in the email interface. Also, Live@edu services are engineered with essential controls for Education, such as bad word filter, anti-bullying or closed campus functionality. Check out Securing Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure (
http://www.globalfoundationservices.com/security/documents/SecuringtheMSCloudMay09.pdf) for more information.
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34. How long will it take to implement Live@edu in my school?
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Our research shows it takes about 15-20 minutes to complete the initial enrollment and then anywhere from a few weeks to a few months for complete roll-out depending on the size of your school and the deployment options selected. For more information, see the Live@edu Deployment Guide. (
http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd229064.aspx)
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35. Can Live@edu be integrated my school's existing systems?
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Yes, Live@edu services can be integrated with your existing portal and directory systems. Integration with existing authentication systems will also be supported in the near future. See Live@edu
Case Studies
for examples of how universities such as St. John's and the University of Aberdeen created a seamless sign-on experience for their users and integrated Live@edu with their Active Directory® service.
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36. What is Microsoft doing to help my school meet its compliance requirements for privacy and security?
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Live@edu provides reliable and easy-to-use tools to support your organization's security and compliance strategy. For example, administrators can use the multi-mailbox search function in Outlook Live to search by keyword across multiple mail boxes. You can also implement supervision policies that control who can send email to and from specific users, and filter and reject email that contains objectionable words. In addition, we are continually investing in our anti-spam / anti-virus solution to protect your school.
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37. What type of support will Microsoft provide after my school's initial enrollment?
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Live@edu offers free support and management tools to school IT administrators with 24x7 online and telephone support, plus the Live@edu Service Management Portal and online Support Community (
http://outlookliveanswers.com/liveatedu/Default.aspx). Microsoft will also help you roll-out Live@edu services to your school with a suite of marketing and training materials and on-campus training support.
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38. Do I need to buy any hardware to deploy Live@edu?
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No. Live@edu is offered at no cost to the institution. If schools want to automate account management, they can purchase server software from Microsoft, discounted especially for the Live@edu program, but there’s no requirement to purchase a server.
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39. Is Live@edu available for my K-12 school?
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Yes, Live@edu is available for all educational institutions - K-12 and Higher-Ed - and its users, including students, parents, faculty, staff and alumni.
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40. Why would a K-12 school be interested in Live@edu services?
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Students thrive when they are more engaged. Microsoft Live@edu helps you extend learning beyond the classroom walls by making select classroom information, like class materials, schedules, and announcements available online in a controlled environment – creating a deeper engagement between teachers, students, and parents.
Additionally, Live@edu offers a technology solution that meets the changing needs of your K-12 school. By allowing Microsoft to host your school's email and collaboration services, you can provide your end users with the latest technology while reducing costs. At the same time, Live@edu’s security and privacy controls help you create a controlled environment for your school. For example, Live@edu blocks all third party ads in the email interface and transport rules allow administrators to defend against objectionable content and implement anti-cyber-bullying policies.
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41. What administrative tools are available to help manage Live@edu services in a K-12 environment?
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Microsoft Live@edu provides administrators reliable and easy-to-use tools to build a controlled digital environment for their school. Live@edu’s single sign-on solution integrates Live@edu services with existing school systems, including your school portal, allowing students to access all the content they need with one identity, making everything easy and simple. Administrators are able to tailor their school’s Live@edu services to support their organization's security and compliance strategy, including the ability to:
- Build a closed campus supervision policy, helping administrators prevent students from sending or receiving emails from unapproved sources.
- Create a “bad word” supervision policy that helps filter emails containing objectionable material
- Implement an anti-cyber-bullying policy to protect students from harassment email messages
- Review and monitor student online activity with a robust cross-mailbox search
