One of my international colleagues, Ben Nunney, who is a Live@edu deployment specialist, has been working recently with the University of Chichester, and has just got one of them to reflect on how everything went.  The post is an excellent read.

To me, a number of things jump out:

• Live@edu works when integrated into a mixed environment.  Novell, SunONE, Linux, Windows… there is a who’s who of tech vendors and technologies in there… typical for a lot of universities that have evolved their IT infrastructure over time.  It is a common misconception that a Microsoft solution has a high number of on-premises dependencies… we don’t.
• As with any project, a good plan is important – simply sticking some commodity services into the cloud, like email, does not auto-magically mean that users will simply latch on day one… I like the University’s approach here around training and solution due diligence.
• Vendor roadmap and quality of support is important in making a decision to move to the cloud.  These were the primary reasons that Live@edu was selected, but it is a factor that often gives pause for a number of customers… in moving to the cloud, you can’t simply lay your hands on the servers any more if something happens… you need to rely on the vendor providing support.

Ben says he is planning some more of these… maybe I will get one of my customers to do one… I think feedback like this is highly valuable.

Enjoy!

Jonny

Exciting times for Moodle users that also are considering Live@edu!

Today, the Education Products Group (EdPG) announced the availability of the Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle at the Open Source Conference 2009 (OSCON). The Plug-in is a free downloadable solution that provides integrated access to Live@edu services such as email, calendar, instant messaging and search directly within the Moodle user experience for the classroom, and allows easy access to such services with one simple sign-on. This means students, teachers and faculty can quickly communicate, collaborate and conduct research from directly inside the Moodle learning management system. 

To help Live@EDU customers gain access to and understand this functionality, Microsoft is releasing the full source and accompanying documentation to the plug-in. The team believes this will be useful to Live@EDU customers who use or are considering using Moodle; they are also hoping schools using Moodle will consider signing up for Live@EDU services now that the Plug-in integrates some of them (e.g. Outlook Live and Windows Live Messenger) directly into the Moodle environment. 

The Microsoft Live Services Plug-In for Moodle is available at the Education Labs website (www.educationlabs.com) which also launched today. This is a new site where the Education Products Group will post some of their latest projects and ideas to get early community involvement and feedback, and where early adopters can go to learn about our latest research in the education vertical segment  The Live Services Plug in for Moodle is the first code released on Education Labs site.

Download, FAQ and Developer Guide: http://www.educationlabs.com/projects/moodleproduct/Pages/default.aspx

Michael Golden blog post announcement here.

Port 25 Microsoft Open Source Community blog post here.

Channel 9 demo video here.

Channel 9 video on the Education Labs group here.

Jonnu

This question came up today with a customer I was talking to that wanted to create MailUser objects in Outlook Live along with associated LiveIDs.  The customer wanted to create the MailUsers in an Accepted Domain they had set up on Outlook Live so that they could give their Faculty and Staff an ads-free experience on things like SkyDrive/Office Live Workspaces.

The customer ran into an issue when they tried to create some MailUsers with LiveIDs that existed before they had enrolled in the Live@edu program with Outlook Live.  They got the following error message:

Member name is used by an unmanaged member. UnmanagedMemberExists: The specified member name is in use.

We document how to deal with this when this happens while trying to create mailboxes, but I wanted to let you know that the same switches work with the New-MailUser cmdlet.

so for example:

New-MailUser -Name "Tamara Johnston" -WindowsLiveID tjohnston@contoso.com –ImportLiveID

Hope that helps!

Jonny

So I have been blogging here for 12 months now, and the journey has been exciting and rewarding for me.  According to the little ClustrMaps widget I have on my home page, I have received hits totaling many thousands from all over the world.  I also get to see search referrals, and I see that many of these hits are from education customers as opposed to folks simply wanting to know how things like PowerShell works in general… so that is also good.

You may have noticed that I am posting a lot now over on the latest service from our Exchange Team, http://outlookliveanswers.com/, but I will continue to post here as new topics and questions come up.  I am currently fiddling around with ILM and GalSync 2010 on a Virtual PC that I am setting up… I hope to be able to demo some ideas and concepts on that soon… I used to do MMS/MIIS in the past… so I am on the ramp up again on that technology.

Anyway… keep the comments and questions coming in.

Jonny