That's comparing 25 million Goog Apps users IN TOTAL, ie edu+business+private users against 15 million EDU users of live@edu, it misses out the private+business users of the other versions of Microsoft Live, which I'm sure will be over 10 million .Originally Posted by CyberNerd
Last edited by teejay; 9th November 2011 at 12:44 PM.
Your comment made me think of this and I just had to...
Moot point if MS didn't deem live@edu good enough to release to business.
Yes, they do, it's under the Office Live branding, which is moving to Office 365.
Its called Office 365 and yes businesses do use it. I don't have any idea of figures though, both systems provide a service that is useful, some prefer one over the other, sans the pissing contest, the end.
Pretty much the same thing just a different name and more expantion possibilities, you can pay a bit more and get Sharepoint, Lync/Exchange voice services, video calling etc.
Back to the OP:
Exchange internally give you local speed, and full control over it so you can customise it more, add extentions etc. Live@edu means les control, full dependence on the internet even for internal mail, internet link limited speed but also means that someone else looks after the hardware and software.
Exchange is not really that bad in my experience, pretty set and forget other than the odd service pack that breaks little things. Just give it a decent chunk of hardware and back it up regularly (to allow the logs and DBs to compress propperly) and its usually pretty happy.
Last edited by SYNACK; 9th November 2011 at 01:26 PM.
live@edu is being replaced with an edu version of Office 365, yes.
Thought as much. Thats what the OP was complaining about. You get voice and video calls free with google domains, along with SDC to connect to internal sites for web mashups. I'll stop now.
I'm talking about the specific education versions of these services though. I read an article from this year which stated that Google had been cagey about their figures for education take up, but that they were in the sub 10 million figure. Microsoft had equally been cagey, but said they were in excess of 10 million, or at least 10s of millions. I did not save the link, but I'm guessing a quick Google (irony noted!) would find it.
Irrespective of whether it's Google or Microsoft in terms of the online service, there are still advantages to having a local service instead. It's more the case for me of comparing the online vs. local in terms of what's best. I'm still thinking it's the latter for control reasons, despite the additional cost, and swayed by some of the views above about Live.edu.
The MS vs. Linux (etc.) debate is probably going to be no different here to anywhere else. We could switch the whole school to Linux, but it would require significant investment in terms of the time to do it and upgrading the skill of the team here. One of a number of reasons why it wouldn't be very practical just to be different.
Aside from the ability to access your Exchange server even when your Internet connection is down (something that would be a problem for every 'cloud' service) what are the features of on-prem Exchange that you feel are must-haves that aren't offered by Live@edu?
Regarding the offline access point - realistically how often is your Internet connection down during work hours? Out of hours outages (i.e. on a snow day, for example, when people need access from home) are more likely to have a bigger impact, in which case a cloud service is an ideal way to ensure continuity of communications, whether that's email, IM or document storage.
Last edited by jamesbmarshall; 9th November 2011 at 03:47 PM. Reason: Spelling
This is an important point. When we planned our move to cloud services we offset the ongoing maintenance, licensing and upgrades of exchange vs upgrading our broadband link. We ended up ditching the LA's offering for a 30Mb/s connection on 100Mb/s bearer which had a 99.96% SLA (cashback for downtime and included ADSL backup), this actually saved us £900 p/a without the savings made on internally hosting the email server.
We moved from a local exchange server to Live@edu 6 months ago.
Couldn't be happier really, its amazing having email just work instead of maintaining a server.
As already mentioned its ridiculously hard to do single sign on but as most of our teachers use outlook client which saves the login details its not really a problem for them.
The students have to sign in each time but they have got used to that now and not had a single complaint. Infact it makes it much easier because its the same process to sign on inside school as outside.
The 10gb storage, 99.9% uptime, virus scanning, and general ease of use make it well worth doing.
I seriously doubt in a couple of years time anyone will be running their own exchange server. Its like running a nuclear power station in your basement to heat your house
How do you make that comparison, I get this responce sometimes and I just don't understand. Exchange is a snap, what are these issues people have with it?I seriously doubt in a couple of years time anyone will be running their own exchange server. Its like running a nuclear power station in your basement to heat your house
Agreed, once it's up and running it's very low maintenance. Initial setup can be a bit daunting, but there are some very good step by step guides out there.
It really depends on how you're going to use it as to the choice between exchange and live@edu, for us it really is a mission critical form of communication during the school day for staff, so we run staff email on our own virtualised exchange servers. Student email isn't so critical, so that's on live@edu, partly because we lock it down on domains they can send/receive to/from which I find easier to manage on live@edu.
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