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Online Focus

U Wisconsin Expands Collaboration with Office Live Workspace

4/9/2008


After its success with e-mail accounts in Live@edu last year, Durso saw the benefits in expanding a year later to Office Live Workspace--especially free of charge. "It gave us an opportunity, at no added cost, to move beyond just mail communications--and messaging and calendaring and some of the other capabilities [in Live@edu]--to start to store and share documents, coursework, and notes," Durso explained. "It's a nice compliment to further supporting collaboration and interaction with faculty and staff and one another, all on existing accounts."

Anyone running Microsoft Office--the university's standard desktop software package--can use Office Live Workspace as an online extension of familiar Microsoft Office applications to view, change and save any standard office file, including Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, using a browser interface. Collaboration capabilities can track who has made what changes to a file. A document in Microsoft Word, for example, can be edited in a shared version over Office Live Workspace just as it would be in Word.

Users who aren't running Microsoft Office get a limited set of capabilities: They can view and mark up shared documents, for example, but can't create them or make substantial changes. To do that, they need to download a document to a machine running a full version of Microsoft Office. Durso said students are also using the collaboration capabilities to exchange Microsoft Access databases.

Durso first introduced several early-adopter faculty volunteers to Microsoft Live Workspace, choosing those with coursework that lent itself to collaboration. The university "had toyed with some freeware wikis" in response to faculty requests for collaborative abilities, she said, but nothing was yet part of the standard software infrastructure.

After two pilot efforts within different areas of the university, the school began to offer the product campus-wide in early March. One thing Durso is waiting for is reports and statistics on just who within the university is using the new product--something she doesn't yet have access to.

To raise awareness of the new product and generate excitement, the university launched an internal communication campaign, with help from Microsoft, including banners, handbills, and information tables, to encourage use. "We didn't want them not to use it because they weren't aware of it."


Along with collaboration capabilities, freeing students from the campus network is a big plus of Office Live Workspace, according to Durso. "A good percentage of our students are commuters who work in the community as well as attend college," she explained. "This gives them the ability to interact and do group coursework and collaboration in a platform environment that Microsoft provides. It extends our network."

One concern she hears from colleagues at other schools, Durso said, is a common issue around outsourcing a key service like e-mail--worries about a loss of control. But "we still maintain control on the front end," Durso pointed out, and said she maintains the same best practices around e-mail and document control, such as prohibiting auto-forwarding of e-mail. "You have to be practical and realistic about what you can do with technology and standards and control ... and this doesn't change any of that."