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Online Focus

U Wisconsin Expands Collaboration with Office Live Workspace

4/9/2008

Students at the University of Wisconsin at Parkside can now enjoy file collaboration capabilities via a free software-and-service product from Microsoft called Office Live Workspace. The university, which last year outsourced its student e-mail accounts to Microsoft Live@edu, now offers students, faculty, and staff the ability to store, share, edit, and collaborate on documents in common Microsoft file formats including Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Students can use Office Live Workspace to organize study groups, work together on assignments, share class notes, and keep shared schedules and group task lists. 

Microsoft unveiled the "software plus services" offering, Office Live Workspace, last year as a free online extension of the Microsoft Office suite. As such, Office Live Workspace frees students, faculty, and staff from the campus network, allowing them to access and collaborate on documents online anywhere that they have an Internet connection and a browser.

The university implemented Microsoft Live@edu in April 2007 for its e-mail and message capabilities; this March, it followed with its introduction of Office Live Workspace. According to CIO Ann Marie Durso, "this gave us a way, at no added cost and on a platform and environment [university users] are already familiar with, to expand the ability to interact, to collaborate, and to store beyond just mail messages."

Previously, the university offered limited storage space to each student with his or her e-mail account. To share or exchange a large file, students resorted to devices such as a flash drive. And users had to be on campus to log in and use the campus facilities and network--a significant constraint for commuter students. With Office Live Workspace, students can use a browser to access documents online anywhere that they have an Internet connection. With Office Live Workspace's collaborative features, they can also share documents.

Through Live@edu, the university can offer each e-mail user 5G of mail storage; Durso said that Office Live Workspace doesn't come with a specific size constraint, but is advertised as allowing each user to store up to 1,000 documents.



Calendar feature in OLW

The university rolled out Microsoft Live@edu to improve and extend the e-mail services it offers students. Durso said that the university migrated not only all current students to the outsourced e-mail system last year but gave an account to each student going back two years, as well as prospective, graduate and continuing education students--some 14,000 accounts total. By outsourcing e-mail to Micrsoft Live@edu, Durso gains benefits that include lifetime e-mail accounts for each student, no hardware or software to maintain, including no backup chores, and much more space per e-mail account than she could offer students previously.