You want LiveIDs for your school or college, but you don’t want Microsoft’s hosted email

I have had this request from customers now a few times, so I thought I would record a little podcast outlining the steps involved to configure this scenario.  Some customers are quite happy to continue to manage their own on-premise email solution, but when they see some of the things you can do using Live Services, they do not want the fact that they will retain email in-house to preclude them from these great tools.  Microsoft does not mandate that you have to use one of our email services to be able to use or other online services.

Happily any email address can be associated with a LiveID, all a LiveID is, remember, just a username and password that can be associated with any number of services.  Individuals can get a LiveID here, but what Microsoft offers through our Windows Live Custom Domains service is a facility to manage LiveIDs that associate with your organization’s external DNS name individually and in bulk…all at no charge, and with suppressed ads if you are part of the Live@Edu program.

 http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/71782/LiveIDswithnoemail/iframe.html

download

To be able to replicate this demo, you will need a domain to fiddle around with so that you can create the requisite CNAME entries to prove your ownership to the service.  I use GoDaddy.com for my tests as you can/will see, but you could of course use whatever you have available as the principles are the same.  You will also need to obtain the EduExpress tool to enable you to do bulk user creation from a csv file amongst other things .  I have a copy of this on my SkyDrive.

Thanks!

Jonny