Exchange 2010 vs Live@edu

[leonard.powers]

I've been asked to look at live@edu and just wanted to know if there are any benefits over Exchange 2010. We currently have an Exchange 2003 setup for all staff and students. This works well and all students have OWA as well.

As a school we can purchase educational licenses very cheaply. An upgrade to Exchange 2010 will cost us £89.00 for standard or £464.00 for the enterprise version. I've also got to factor in a new server and an upgrade to older 2003 client licenses.

All the papers I've read on the Microsoft site just mention Universities moving from their "old email system" and saving loads of money. No one ever says they dumped Exchange 2010 for live@edu or in fact any Exchange version.

So just what are the benefits? I can already see issues with bandwidth. We have 1 support staff who sends out the cover list via email to every teacher each money (300 of them). That could potentially be 300 separate attachment downloads each day.

And what about if I send an email to someone sitting next door. Email goes out into the cloud only to be downloaded again. Not very efficient.

I've also been reading about live@edu moving across to Office365 so that Microsoft can offer more advanced features (chargeable of course).

Any advice or thoughts would be helpful.

Many thanks

Leonard

[RabbieBurns]

we use live@edu for our 2000 students, but use exchange for stafff

Live@edu is good because it is free, and it is easily deployed and managed.

If you can afford to host email in house and the cost of savings is negligable, then exchange is fine. You can host your own Office Web Apps as well I believe.

[sparkeh]

we use live@edu for our 2000 students, but use exchange for stafff

Can you explain why that decision was made? Is there an advantage to Exchange over Live@edu?

[RabbieBurns]

Exchange has always been used for staff, students never used to have email

So when it was decided to give students email, live@edu was decided as it was free, and didnt require any other costs (except for $200 for ILM to manage the account migration)

[sparkeh]

Exchange has always been used for staff, students never used to have email

So when it was decided to give students email, live@edu was decided as it was free, and didnt require any other costs (except for $200 for ILM to manage the account migration)

I see so it was more of a status quo for the staff as it was running fine so leave it be?
If it came a point where you wanted to upgrade or something you would have no problem moving staff to live@edu?

Looking into this myself you see

[RabbieBurns]

Tough quesiton. We have a couple of users on the SLT who we (reluctantly) have given a 30mb attachment size as we are undergoing major building works and they are doing a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with the architects and some very large drawings are changing hands. Im not entirely sure how easy it is to set attachment size limits for live@edu users on an individual basis (although it probably is doable via powershell)

Also, Im not sure how easy it is to recover deleted emails from live@edu, and also there is the legal requirement to have archives of all business email correspondance, it just makes it a lot more manageable having the staff on a local exchange server.

[CyberNerd]

we dumped exchange 2003 for Google apps. We cited lower costs of ownership (disk space, backup, repair, server renewal, cals, ease of setup) and increased functionality (better spam filters, better profanity filters, uptime guarantee ) as well as the benefits of shared documents, sites, photos, messaging, helpdesk integration.

[RobJohnson]

Staff on our Exchange server here with students this year being farmed out to Live@edu. Simple reasoning, why have to keep spending cash hosting emails for 5000 students when Microsoft would happily do it for free. With the increased mailbox, Skydrive and webapps it was a no brainer really. Staff will stay on our Exchange server as we have to maintain archives etc.

[plexer]

If you live@edu surely you could use skydrive rather than send out an email with an attachment to 300 people?

Ben

[leonard.powers]

Thanks for all the replies. Has anyone experienced issues with large attachements. If there isn't a set attachement limit as such, pulling down a 100mb zip file or emailing it to everyone in a class to download could cause problem for our internet link.

From my point of view, if your going to have teachers and support staff on Exchange 2010 and students on Live@edu, surely it makes management more difficult. It certainly looks tempting to switch across but I feel schools that haven't given email to students before and are now giving out email are the ones that are benefitting the most. Schools like my one with exchange email for all students and staff might not benefit so much.

As for the storage quota of 10gb, that's not realistic in todays businesses. I've got plenty of friends who work for the likes of Santander, Audi Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz, Unisys etc who all have their UK head offices in Milton Keynes. Each staff member gets between 20mb-100mb storage capacity. So 10GB isn't what it's like out there in the real world. Just a headline grabbing figure I suspect.

Has anyone encountered any hidden costs, maybe in terms of ICT support staff training or setting up mailboxes etc.

[sparkeh]

Thanks for all the replies. Has anyone experienced issues with large attachements. If there isn't a set attachement limit as such

Live@edu has an 18mb attachment limit

[FN-GM]

I think you should also consider Google Apps for Education. I am a big fan on it. I have never used the support on it yet, might give it a try

I have never looked at Live@edu

[gshaw]

Also look into integration possibilities with your VLE... Live@Edu does it with Moodle (although there are a few gotchas with the implementation) as does Google Apps, which helps bring everything together under one "portal"

As far as local vs hosted goes for student accounts why pay for the storage and aggro when MS or Google will do it free. For staff we've kept Exchange for additional control over limits etc as above. Exchange also gives staff file access through OWA which comes in handy for us.

[RabbieBurns]

gshaw: have you upgeaded to the September release of the Moodle plugin? Is there any new features etc?

[PiqueABoo]

Belatedly noticed this thread: Half the problem with it is that we're talking current Live@Edu as opposed to that around-the-corner Office365 for Education where, AFAICT what Edu will get for free is significantly different in lots of useful ways. It's about Business-lite replacing Hotmail-offshoot surely?