A lot of our customers that sign up with Live@edu do so with a fresh new domain/sub-domain that is not currently used to support email for their institution, some however want to continue to use the same domain (e.g. contoso.edu) and replace a legacy service with ours.  A question that comes up in those cases is “What if some of my students are already using their name@contoso.edu email address as a LiveID?  Will this prevent me from enrolling the domain?  Can the affected LiveIDs be imported into the new service and managed by us? Assuming we can enroll the domain, will people be able to create their own LiveIDs?”  Perhaps you have some of your own questions related to this scenario that you would like to ask here… or over on http://liveatedu.groups.live.com?

So lets answer these questions…

“Will this prevent me from enrolling the domain?”

No.  You can still enroll the domain in the Live@edu program. The effect of doing so will turn your domain into an reserved domain.

“Can the affected LiveIDs be imported into the new service and managed by us?”

Yes, you can use our import tools to import any pre-existing LiveIDs that you know about into the managed service.  In doing so, the LiveID will also be associated with a shiny new Exchange mailbox.

“Assuming we can enroll the domain, will people be able to create their own LiveIDs with Exchange Mailboxes?” 

No, the effect of domain enrollment means that only an administrator can create LiveIDs and mailboxes.  Anyone that tries to do this will be presented with the following message:

  I hope that clears things up.

Jonny

A topic that I get asked about from time to time by customers has to do with mail migration from a legacy mail service to Outlook Live.  We are still working on our own migration tools, but this is not to say that migration is impossible today; you do have some options.

• You can get your end user population to do it manually - we provide guidance on this here.  You can use this to migrate mail/calendar/contacts/tasks.  If you are currently running Exchange for your students, you can partially complete this task for your users by extracting pst files using a tool like ExMerge.
• You can turn on the POP protocol on you legacy email system, and then have your users connect to it from within their Exchange Labs OWA session using Email Subscriptions in a browser that supports the full OWA experience, and then they can simply click and drag their mail from the old service to the new.  This will work for mail only - other things like calendar/contacts/tasks cannot be accessed over the POP protocol.
• Wait until we release R3 (starting Feb 2009) and you can use POP Email Subscriptions and PowerShell to do the migration.
• You can use a 3rd party tool that supports secure POP/IMAP migrations...more below...again this will only work for mail migration only.

We have turned on the POP and IMAP protocols on Exchange Labs, and in an examination of how this might help with administrator-driven mail migrations, I have been working recently with one vendor of POP/IMAP migration software - Dataenter from Austria, and I have been looking at their POPBeamer product.  I set them up with an Exchange Labs account on my test domain, and then they were gracious enough to do a mini mail migration from a POP mail environment to Exchange Labs... screen shots below... 

While I spent some time on PopBeamer, you may also find other alternatives.

Hope that helps!

Jonny

Just last week at the CES show, Microsoft released a new technology called Microsoft Tag - the site is here: http://tag.microsoft.com.  So what is it, and how is this relevant to education?  Well imagine putting posters up around your institution with a little tag, just like the ones you see below in the corner somewhere.  Posters could be about your Live@edu launch, a club meetup, a helpline, etc.  A student looks at the poster, thinks "that is interesting, I must remember to:

• ...visit the website to learn more about Live@edu in my college
• ...add those contact details for that chess club
• ...call that number to book an appointment"

...but as they stand in the corridor, weighed down by a laptop, some books, their MP3 player, and they only have one hand available, what are the chances they will actually do anything?

Well, if their SmartPhone is configured with Microsoft Tag, all they have to do is point and shoot at the tag, and then some magic will happen.  I just set this up for myself on my t-mobile Dash, and I was blown away with how easy it all was.  Install a small app on the phone, and within a minute I had added my colleague's contact details to my phone by taking a snap of my laptop screen!!!

I then created a couple of my own tags... these are below.

This will present my contact details as a VCF on your SmartPhone

This will load up the home page of my blog on your SmartPhone

So what does this work with?  From the FAQ:

The Microsoft Tag Reader is available for most SmartPhones and many feature phones. It is available on Windows Mobile, J2ME, iPhone, Blackberry, and Symbian S60 phones. Of course, your phone needs a camera and it must have Internet-access. A detailed list of all supported phones is available and new phones will be added over time.

The possibilities here are endless... I could of course foresee future e-commerce applications and more...and of course this is all LiveID related.

Happy Tagging!

Jonny

I had blogged previously on creating LiveIDs en masse for your institution through Live@edu but without the email service, and I wanted to expand on this scenario here a little.

A common scenario that I encounter is that an institution wants to put their students/alumni/etc onto Exchange Labs but keep their faculty and staff email on an on-premise solution such as Exchange 2007.  In creating mailboxes on Exchange Labs for students, you are also creating LiveIDs for the students to authenticate with; with these LiveIDs students can then go on to collaborate with each other on some of our other online services such as SkyDrive or Office Live Workspaces.  Teachers of course will not get LiveIDs as part of this provisioning... so what's to be done here?

Lets look at an example.  Student email is hosted on an Exchange Labs tenant my.contoso.edu and faculty and staff are in the contoso.edu DNS namespace which is supported by an on-premise email solution. The task is to turn all of the email addresses on contoso.edu into LiveIDs.  The setup and provision processes are as follows at the time of writing.

• Enroll the student domain, my.contoso.edu, first with Live@edu as an Exchange Labs tenant
• Activate the student domain through MX record verification...get it fully up and running
• Enroll the faculty/staff domain, contoso.edu, with Live@edu on Exchange Labs
• When following the invitation choose "No Mail" for the service type... you won't need mailboxes as you have them already on premise
• Use CNAME verification to verify ownership of the domain... you will need to log an Ops Request with our Education Business Desk to continue using the CNAME record in the long term
• As there are no mailboxes, you can use CSVImport.exe or EduExpress with a csv file containing your Faculty/Staff email details to create the LiveIDs
• ...you may also want to use a variation of the CSV file to create MailContacts in your student GAL.  This can be done with PowerShell

So that's it...for now... as the scenario changes, I will update the steps.

Thanks

Jonny

A recurring theme that comes up a lot when I speak to customers is the effect the economic downturn is having on their budgets at a local level.  Many have been asked to plan for significant percentage cuts in the light of budget freezes in this current financial year ending in June, and others are staring at further cuts in the new financial year.  I am sure this is the same the world over right now.  Ironically at a time when budgets are being cut, institutions, especially those in the higher education sector, see their enrollments go up.  As workers retrain for the jobs that may be required in the ultimate economic upswing, they will get the required skills at academic institutions.  In the light of this, education customers that I speak to are leaving no stone unturned in extracting the maximum value from their IT investments.

At Microsoft, we believe that, by taking a proactive approach, you can not only sustain your institution through these trying times, but also make progress toward achieving your objectives.  It doesn’t always require major new investments on your part to improve your IT infrastructure and efficiency – from the server room to your workstations. I encourage you to take a look at the steps you can take to reduce IT and organizational costs and enable your people to work smarter—by leveraging the products you already have, and by looking at programs like Live@edu.

You can find some good examples of ideas (including Live@edu, of course) on our new website http://www.microsoft.com/education/economy/default.aspx. You can also join Rod Gode for a Webcast on January 28^th at 10:30 Pacific focusing on how customers can save with solutions from Microsoft. To register Click here or visit http://www.educationwebcasts.com/Webcast.aspx?i=4182

Topics will include:

· Saving with Virtualization technologies

· Maintaining and expanding IT services with software you may already own

· Saving by spending less time managing and deploying IT infrastructure

I hope this helps.

Jonny

As folks that are signed up for Exchange Labs through Live@edu may know, the underlying technology for the email solution is Exchange 14.  This is the forth-coming version of Microsoft Exchange, which will ship from us at some point in the near future.  Exchange 2007 is Exchange 12 (in case you did not know)... so where is Exchange 13?  Well, just like many buildings do not have a 13th floor, and the fact that many people put their right shoe on first or don't walk under ladders, the reason becomes apparent.  Personally I often walk under ladders, with only a left shoe on :)

Anyway, KC Lemson and Jim Lucey have just recorded a video and blogged on Exchange 14, and in it they outline many of the features that our education customers have come to love over the last few months; they even do some demos.  If you are still on the fence about the program, or are simply curious, I recommend you take a look...I am sure you will agree that we are doing some really cool things here. As we get closer to release, this will only get better still.

In the post, Jim and KC call out the Live@edu program in a big way, and mention customers (Go Coos Bay!).  They also throw out an impressive stat:

"Today, more than 3.5 million people (students, faculty, staff, alumni) in more than 1,500 schools are using E14 through Exchange Labs, and we are adding more every day."

I visit the MSEXCHANGETEAM blog often. From today, if you are interested in what is in the pipeline with Exchange 14, I recommend you do the same :)

Enjoy!

Jonny

I just spotted that Angus Logan, who is currently at the 2008 Crunchie Awards in San Francisco, is blogging on Microsoft winning a award for Best Technology Innovation/Achievement!  I also had to smile at Steve Clayton's blog on this... in the UK, a Crunchie is a chocolate (candy, as they say in the US) bar :)

Voting was intense... 350K votes cast apparently, and the competition was rife, but the Live Mesh team prevailed in the end.

Mesh really is a fantastic service, and it has a bright future ahead of it as a core component of our Software + Services strategy.  If you have not tried it out yet, please do so soon, I don't think you will be disappointed at the possibilities here, especially if you are a student and work across multiple devices.

Jonny

As you may know, and might even have tried out, Exchange Labs supports Accepted Domains.  There is an article on Technet that describes this feature in some more detail here, and I previously blogged on this, including giving a setup demo here.  Just as a reminder, and as Technet states, "an accepted domain is any Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) namespace for which an Exchange Labs organization sends or receives e-mail. After you configure an accepted domain for an existing Exchange Labs organization, you can create users in that domain. All e-mail that is sent by users in that accepted domain comes from the accepted domain, and e-mail that is addressed to users in the accepted domain goes to your existing Exchange Labs organization."

So I am currently working with a customer where quite an extensive accepted domain solution may be the way to go.  They are a large school district, and the requirements are working out so far to be:

1. The desire for a single point of administration for all of the school SMTP namespaces as opposed to separate admin accounts for each school.
2. The desire to have a single identity that can be associated with a student as they proceed through the different schools in the district as opposed to having to create new identities (LiveIDs) as schools change.
3. A minimum amount of administration required upon transfer to new schools as opposed to students or the district having to 'migrate' mailboxes, SkyDrive contents, Live contacts, etc.
4. The ability to give the students email addresses that are associated with the schools they attend.

Now, I can't say for sure if the use of Accepted Domains *is* the way to go for this customer just yet, more work needs to be done, but I am fairly confident it is for the following reasons:

On #1: by using Accepted Domains, all of the domains enrolled can be managed by the admin account[s] created in the primary domain.

On #2: student identities will be in the primary domain, e.g. jackjones@unifiedsd.edu, so this does not have to change when students change schools.

On #3: based on #2, contents of mailboxes, SkyDrive, etc will be retained...nothing has to change.

On #4: secondary SMTP addresses (aliases) can be given to the students that are associated with the school they are in, an example may be jackjones@school.unifiedsd.edu, and this alias can be changed as students change schools.  This can be automated.

Of course there are considerations...

• students may have 2 identities - their email address, and their LiveID
• currently on Exchange Labs, the Primary SMTP address must be the same as the Windows LiveID, so the school SMTP address is not authoritative
• the GAL will contain all students from all schools
• etc

These considerations will need to be addressed through careful application of some of the other administrative features in Exchange such as transport layer rules that restricts mailflow between different groups of users in different schools for one...

I will revisit this scenario soon as new features get added to Exchange Labs, and this project progresses.

Jonny

The first post of 2009... so what to say?

Well first of all, thanks to those of you that have signed up for the program, and of course all of my readers in 2008.  According to my little ClustrMap widget, I have now had visits from 2961 unique IP addresses in 80 countries, and this multiplies up to tens of thousands of page views overall.  Even though I only cover the US West Coast, I have had many messages from people interested in Live@edu from all around the world, but I have enjoyed replying to you directly, or putting you in contact with the Microsoft guy/gal in your region for further support.  Thanks also to those folks that left comments on my blog posts, and especially to those altruistic individuals that helped out their peers!

According to the stats I can see from Live Spaces, and the download stats for my podcast recordings, the most popular posts appear to be the more technical ones...so I have made a note to do more of these in coming months... if you have any special requests for topics, please let me know, otherwise I will just keep plugging away at whatever I am getting asked most frequently about by customers.  More PowerShell, anyone?  What a great tool that is...once you have conquered it!

Along with our MS Russia Live@edu guy, Anton Mamichev, we just kicked off a community site at http://liveatedu.groups.live.com.  So I am hoping that this will end up be a good place for you all to interact with each other in to some more depth...I will check in there also to keep the discussion going.  As with all online communities: content, platform, membership, and other factors all play a part in its success... so we will do our best here!

Anyway, that is all for now. I look forward to keeping the dialog going with everyone, and making your projects as successful as they can be!

Later!

Jonny