“With Live@edu, students get the same great email service they had using Exchange Server 2007, with 10 times the storage and extra collaboration services, at no cost.” Walt Brannon, Manager of Messaging and Media Systems, University of New Orleans The University of New Orleans (UNO) wanted a more scalable email solution and improved online collaboration services for its students. UNO provisioned 45,000 student and alumni accounts to Microsoft Live@edu at no cost. Today, all students are working more productively with anywhere, anytime access to email and storage services in the cloud. UNO can better connect with graduates, and IT is avoiding U.S.$400,000 in future hardware costs. Business Needs Culturally, economically, and intellectually, the University of New Orleans (UNO) is one of the major assets of the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana. UNO is an urban research university with a broad range of academic programs, nearly one- quarter of which are at the master’s or doctoral level. The IT department at UNO works hard to provide top-quality services for faculty, staff, and students. “The Computing Center’s goal is to deploy the best tools for learning,” says Walt Brannon, Manager of Messaging and Media Systems at the University of New Orleans. “Email is one of the most important tools students have on campus, keeping them connected to their faculty, their peers, and their family.” Every UNO student is added to the university’s on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 messaging and collaboration solution upon registration. And, based on a decision by UNO administration, students can keep their mailboxes for life. By the beginning of 2010, UNO was maintaining more than 45,000 student mailboxes alone. “The email environment was getting too large and expensive to maintain,” says Brannon. “And the students wanted more than their allotted 1 gigabyte [GB] of storage space per mailbox. We needed to find an alternative email solution that was scalable and affordable.” UNO also provided students with 300 megabytes of shared space on its network to store their files. Called iDrive, the service was only accessible to students while on campus. “Students were backing up their papers on USB flash drives and there was a risk that they could lose the devices,” says Brannon. “They wanted a more flexible option where they could access their work from anywhere they could connect to the Internet.” Solution When Brannon heard about Microsoft Live@edu , he knew he had found the right student email and collaboration solution for the University of New Orleans. Live@edu is a no-cost suite of hosted communication and collaboration services that includes Microsoft Office Outlook Live web-based email, which provides 10 GB of storage, and Windows Live SkyDrive technology, which provides 25 GB of online storage per user. UNO was excited about the Live@edu solution because the campus runs on a Microsoft-centric IT infrastructure and IT staffers use the Active Directory Domain Services directory for network resources. “With Live@edu, we could maintain Customer: University of New Orleans Website: www.uno.edu Country or Region: United States Industry: Education—University Customer Profile The University of New Orleans in Louisiana serves more than 11,000 graduate and undergraduate students and has conferred more than 70,000 degrees since the first graduating class of 118 in 1962. Software and Services Services − Microsoft Live@edu − Microsoft Office Outlook Live − Windows Live SkyDrive Microsoft Server Product Portfolio − Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Enterprise − Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Enterprise Edition Technologies − Active Directory Domain Services For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit: www.microsoft.com/casestudies Microsoft Online Services Customer Solution Case Study University Saves $400,000 in Future Hardware Costs by Moving Email to the Cloud