Just picked this one up today from my trusty Bing News Alert that I set up for “Live@edu”.

Washington University in St Louis has just chosen Live@edu as their email and collaboration platform of choice for a pilot group of students in the forthcoming Fall semester.

Good on them, I say…

Some nice quotes from Andrew Ortstadt, Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Services and Technology.

"When compared with the University's current systems, Live@EDU provides better communications tools and eliminates multiple University e-mail accounts for students," Ortstadt said. "It also allows University information technology staff to better focus on supporting technology that enhances learning and other academic initiatives within the schools."

"The ability to closely link technologies between Live@EDU and WUSTL not only brings many benefits to our students but also offers several benefits for University operations,"

Jonny

The Outlook Live service, and the peripheral service “add-ons” are evolving at a rapid pace… and as a new customer it is important not to miss out on some of the cool features we support, and that may benefit your end users.

The Outlook Live help authoring team has just released a new tool that steps customers through some key questions, and then interactively builds a list of deployment steps to get you where you need to be.

Take a look: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/ms.exch.edu.deployment.aspx

Choose your deployment type:

Answer some questions:

… and then see the recommended guidance.

Great Stuff!

Jonny

Just a quick note… I love highlighting our case studies :)

From the case study: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000005006 

Florida’s Palm Beach Community College did not provide an email service, so administration used students’ personal e-mail addresses for campus communications. This method was unreliable and made it difficult to maintain relationships with alumni. Then the college deployed Microsoft® Live@edu, a set of free, hosted communication services. Now students always receive campus email, and the college can stay connected with alumni.

“Live@edu meets the needs of a community college. Its email service is free, it’s easy to deploy and maintain, and it’s dependable. The additional collaboration services will be a huge bonus.”
Tony Parziale
Chief Information Officer, Palm Beach Community College

thanks!

Jonny

First of all, it is great to be posting on PowerShell again… it has been too long :)

I got a question from a K-12 customer today about the email subscriptions interface in Outlook Web Access.  Email subscriptions is a great service that allows students to pull their mail in from any other accounts they might have into a consolidated inbox.  Some schools, such as Ohio State University, use the service as a mechanism for email migration from legacy student email systems.  In K-12 however, this feature may cause a concern as it allows a student to directly pull content into their Outlook Live inbox that bypasses any filtering or controls that the school may have put in place for inbound email.

Turning the functionality off is a job for custom RBAC roles, and an understanding of how the Outlook Live interface builds the subscriptions in the background.  To turn off email subscriptions for everyone in my personal test domain, I essentially used two resources:

1. A list of the available PowerShell cmdlets in Outlook Live: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd575549.aspx
2. The article on customizing a mailbox plan: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd335876.aspx

I coupled this with the knowledge that some of the interface elements a user gets to see in OWA Options are based on PowerShell cmdlets that a user has indirect access to through the same interface.  So here is what I did:

Displayed the management roles assigned to the DefaultMailboxPlan for informational purposes:

Get-ManagementRoleAssignment -user DefaultMailboxPlan | format-table Role

Created a custom management role that I, in turn, stripped of the cmdlets I do not want:

New-ManagementRole -Name NoSubscriptions_defaultmailboxplan -Parent contososchool.info\myoptions_defaultmailboxplan

Remove-ManagementRoleEntry NoSubscriptions_defaultmailboxplan\Get-HotmailSubscription
Remove-ManagementRoleEntry NoSubscriptions_defaultmailboxplan\Set-HotmailSubscription
Remove-ManagementRoleEntry NoSubscriptions_defaultmailboxplan\New-HotmailSubscription

Remove-ManagementRoleEntry NoSubscriptions_defaultmailboxplan\Get-PopSubscription
Remove-ManagementRoleEntry NoSubscriptions_defaultmailboxplan\Set-PopSubscription
Remove-ManagementRoleEntry NoSubscriptions_defaultmailboxplan\New-PopSubscription

Remove-ManagementRoleEntry NoSubscriptions_defaultmailboxplan\Get-Subscription
Remove-ManagementRoleEntry NoSubscriptions_defaultmailboxplan\New-Subscription
Remove-ManagementRoleEntry NoSubscriptions_defaultmailboxplan\Remove-Subscription

Add the new custom role to the Default Mailbox Plan:

New-ManagementRoleAssignment -User DefaultMailboxPlan -Role NoSubscriptions_defaultmailboxplan -Name NoSubscription_DefaultMailboxPlan_Custom

Removed the built-in management role from the mailbox plan:

Get-ManagementRoleAssignment -User DefaultMailboxPlan -Role MyOptions_DefaultMailboxPlan | Remove-ManagementRoleAssignment

Verified that the original MyOptions_DefaultMailboxPlan role assignment had been removed, and NoSubscription_DefaultMailboxPlan_Custom had been added:

Get-ManagementRoleAssignment -user DefaultMailboxPlan | format-table Role

…anyway, the Options interface now looks like this… note the missing email subscriptions section.

Happy scripting!

Jonny

Following on from my recent post on services opportunities with the Live@edu platform, I wanted to call out a recent product release that Sysint, one of our Gold Certified Partners in Norway, is offering.  The product is called EasySync, I got a recent demo of it, and as per the product description you can find on their website it supports the following:

- Synchronizes users from Active Directory to Outlook Live/Live@edu
- Administration via AD groups
- Secure distribution of Live usernames&passwords via web
- Order Users and Contacts, administrators and distribution lists in Outlook Live
- Order Passwords resets
- Generate unique email addresses in Active Directory, and mail enables users locally
- Generate dynamic distribution groups in Live@edu
- Assign Live@edu management roles

So if sounds like a solution that may be a good fit for you, check it out.

I am hoping to see a whole lot more of these types of out-of-the-box solutions becoming available in the coming months and years.  We will of course continue to release complementary solutions of our own, but the power of an open platform, such as Live@edu offers, is that you get choice.

Jonny

I have been talking to a lot of Microsoft partners recently about the services opportunities that are available for them on our Live@edu platform.  As the platform is currently maturing rapidly, we are finding that customers are wanting to do more and more by way of end-user and architectural customization and also integration with existing on-premises solutions.

I started to document some of the potential services that a partner might offer… consulted with some folks internally… then documented some more.  I have included my musings below for your reference.  On a connected note, Microsoft Partners that are interested in engaging with us more deeply on this should know that we have a Live@edu partner community over on the Microsoft Education Partner Network, run by Michael Wegmann… go over and say “hello!”

So, there you have it… all these, and probably a lot more besides…

Enjoy!

Jonny

The school year is rapidly approaching and for many of our new and existing customers, seizing the window to prepare for the return of students is critical to success.  Tapping into incoming student orientations and welcome communications is one of the very best times to reach an engaged and captive audience of users.

To this end, our new Live@edu Marketing Bill of Materials is ready and waiting.  The BOM includes more than 50 useful downloadable items like mail templates, banners and copy blocks; all with clear calls to action directing students to log-in and start using their Live@edu accounts.  It also contains a playbook designed to show accounts how to drive usage.  If you haven’t already, please visit www.microsoft.com/liveatedu/marketingkit today and start building it into your awareness plans.  It is localized in the following 17 languages:

Chinese (simplified & traditional) > Danish > Dutch > English-US > English-UK > French >French-Canadian > German > Italian > Japanese > Korean > Norwegian > Portuguese >Russian > Spanish > Swedish

These materials are designed to be customizable & easy to implement, but just let us know if you have any questions about how to integrate them into your plans.

Enjoy!