Last week the University of Arizona adopted the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite, our cloud-based communication and collaboration package. This week the Kentucky Department of Education has gone one better and deployed our Live@edu system to more than 700,000 students, faculty members, and administrators in the largest cloud deployment ever in the US.

Live@edu gives the Kentucky school system a flexible, cloud-based solution with great e-mail tools, excellent storage, and effective collaboration features. Chuck Austin, project manager for the Kentucky Department of Education on the Live@edu deployment, wrote us a great blog post about the new system. There’s also a video where Kentucky high school students talk about how the new system helps them.

The rest of the week had some real highlights:

• D8: The All Things Digital conference was a doozy. Steve Jobs kicked things off, talking about Flash, blogging, iPads and the future of the PC and much more. Steve Ballmer, our CEO, and Ray Ozzie, chief software architect talked about cloud computing, the global economy, mobile devices, “Mac Trucks” and more. Articles and videos capture the moments.
• We previewed the new Windows Live Essentials. Updates to Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Movie Maker, Windows Live Mail, and Windows Live Sync will be going into beta in the coming months.
• Ever been to Mars? No? Soon you’ll have the next-best thing – Web access to high-res photos of the Red Planet’s surface. Our partnership with NASA uses our Worldwide Telescope to help map the surface of Mars. The Worldwide Telescope photos of Mars are going to be made available online and Web users will be able to see small rocks, tracks from Martian rovers, and who knows what else?
• To help everyone understand and make better decisions about their health, this week we introduced a feature in our Bing search to overlay public health data on to get a geographical picture of health trends.
• This week at the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, we unveiled a technology preview of our Windows Embedded Compact 7. In the years to come you are bound to see it bring the power of Windows 7 to an array of small devices, such as slates, portable media players, and more.

Posted by Owen Linderholm
Director, Microsoft News Center