Moving to the cloud this summer?

Getting signed up for Live@edu is only a small part of the project that is “deploying Live@edu”. If you’re running an existing mail service for your users the chances are you’re going to want to transfer as much existing mail and other data as possible. Planning your migration is vital for a smooth transition to Live@edu, so what are your options?

If you’re running Microsoft Exchange Server, there’s great news!

Earlier this year we rolled out a service refresh that made it possible to make use of the Exchange mailbox migration tool to migrate your users to Live@edu. If you’re running Exchange 2003, or 2007, you can make use of this tool right now!

The migration service migrates e-mail messages, contacts, and calendar items from your local Exchange mailboxes to the corresponding Live@edu mailboxes.

If you’re not running Exchange Server, there’s still great news!

An alternative to the Exchange Mailbox Migration Tool is the IMAP migration tool that can pull in mail from an IMAP server. Supported IMAP servers include:

• Courier-IMAP
• Cyrus
• Dovecot
• UW-IMAP
• Exchange 2000 Server or previous versions
• Exchange 2003
• Exchange 2007
• Exchange 2010

As well as the free tools offered by Microsoft there are a number of companies out there, including Quest Software and Migration Wiz, who offer migration tools to make your transition to the cloud as smooth as possible, although there may be costs associated with those services.

Remember, migration can take time and the more users and data you have the longer you’re going to need to build into your project plan.  There are some things to watch out for, too; for example, if your existing users have mail in their mailboxes with attachments that are larger than 25MB you need to consider carefully how that will impact your migration.

Of course, if you run into any trouble then there are several places you can go to get some help:

• Self-Service:
  • Outlook Live Help
  • Outlook Live Answers

• Support Services:
  • Online service request
  • 24x7 Telephone support, available through your Service Management Portal 

Have you already migrated to Live@edu? We’d love to know more about your story in the comments!

Pittsford Central School District, in NY State has just rolled out Live@edu to their 6000 students.  Prior to this deployment, Pittsford had been struggling with inefficient communications between their teachers and students.  After a pilot ...read more

Since the first email was sent 40 years ago email use has grown to around 294 billion emails sent every day (in 2010). Even if most of that is spam, it still leaves the inescapable fact that email is pretty important. One of the great things you can do when sending an email is attach a file, but what are the downsides?

• Attachment file size limits are often relatively low – not great for big files
• Potential for viruses
• Not great for mobile devices / low bandwidth connections
• Often requires file compression to ‘fit’, resulting in ambiguity over content of the attachment

Those are just a few of the reasons why I think email attachments are bad – even if I’m guilty of sending them myself…

Introducing SkyDrive

Windows Live SkyDrive is something that every single user of Live@edu gets for free. Many might not even know they’ve got it – but trust me, it’s there! Just browse to http://skydrive.live.com.

With SkyDrive you get access to 25GB of file storage space along with the Microsoft Office Web Apps including Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote – all through the browser, anywhere, anytime. By using SkyDrive as a place to store files, you can share and collaborate on documents really easily.

 

Instead of attaching a file to an email in the traditional way, include a link to the file shared in SkyDrive instead. These are some of the benefits:

• Reduced email size
• Version control when using the Microsoft Office Web Apps
• Collaboration in real time using the Word or Excel Web Apps
• Share more, bigger, files with greater ease and control
• Kinder to mobile workers – when people use a mail client to synchronise their inbox on the go they don’t have to download big attachments (other methods are available!)

So next time you need to send a file to some people, think: SkyDrive!

Lots of people ask me about the ways that Live@edu can help them save money, or become more efficient but occasionally I get asked about how Microsoft makes its cloud services accessible to as many people as possible. Over at our education webcasts site we’ve posted up a webcast that talks about exactly that!

"Our vision is to create innovative technology that is accessible to everyone and that adapts to each person's needs. Accessible technology eliminates barriers for people with disabilities and it enables individuals to take full advantage of their capabilities." - Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft Corporation, microsoft.com/enable

Live@edu and Microsoft Office 365 bring together cloud versions of Microsoft's most trusted communications and collaboration products with the latest version of our desktop suite for educational institutions of all sizes. These Internet-based services are designed to help meet customer needs for institutional productivity, anytime anywhere access, and 24/7 reliability.

In this webcast, Alex Li, a Microsoft Senior Accessibility Strategist, outlines accessibility investments made in core components of Live@edu and Office 365: Exchange Online, Lync Online, SharePoint Online, the Office Web Applications and Office. Alex also provides demonstrations of our most compelling accessibility features, tying to the usage scenarios they enable.

Find out more about the webcast, including details of how to register and watch at the education webcasts site.

Most (if not all!) schools across the United Kingdom are now off for the summer break and won’t be back until the first week of September. Apart from the most committed students and teachers most people will probably be checking their email accounts less frequently than normal and for many students “school” becomes a dirty word. I suspect this is also the case for many teachers!

Of course, not everyone has this long break and, for those outside of education, the next 6 weeks will be ‘business as usual’ so how can you help avoid some of the confusion, delay, and anger that can come about when someone sends you an email and you don’t pick it up for over a month?

Automatic Replies

If you spend more than a few days working at Microsoft you’ll invariably hear or see the term “OOF” when describing someone who is out of office; the reasons why it is known as “OOF” and not “OOO” are part of Microsoft lore but whether you’re out of office for a day or a month setting your “OOF” reply is essential.

Fortunately Outlook Live Help has a handy little guide and video talking about how to set your automatic reply response in Live@edu.

So before you clean the whiteboard, tidy your desk and lock your classroom door, take a moment to set your automatic reply and let others know you’ll be “OOF” for a while!