Host your own mail or outside?

[Shandain]

We have just rolled out live@edu for about 1800 students. (still using exchange for staff) Still in the first week of use, but it seems good. It has a moodle plugin as well to intergrate seamlessly (next on my list)

Its fairly simple to deploy if you want to manually create accounts with a csv or a script or such, but we decided to use Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager which provisions accounts from AD and syncs passwords. This was a PITA to set up due to the documentation not being that great, but Ive got it all working perfectly now.



Feel free to PM if you have any Q's

We are looking at doing the same thing and are considering staff as well. Can you tell me why you chose to keep Staff in house?

[RabbieBurns]

We are looking at doing the same thing and are considering staff as well. Can you tell me why you chose to keep Staff in house?

The staff already had email accounts in exchange. The students didnt have a mail account at all. So we left it as the status quo for the staff. We have since added the staff as a mail-user in live@edu, so they can login to live and use skydrive etc, and also their exchange email addresses are all listed in the live@edu global address list.

Also there was the reason of backups, and keeping central control over them.

And as we are on the Schools Agreement SA, there wasnt really a cost issue either.

[Shandain]

Thanks for the quick reply! I've seen mention of issues related to backups, but I'm not sure what those issues are... is it just for control over them and over restores? Also, do you know if there is functionality that is lost do to migration off site?

Thanks again for the quick reply, and the info. I appreciate it!

[RabbieBurns]

Our staff use email as the main means of communication, and have a multitude of distrobution groups all administered through AD. You can have the same in live@edu but Im not too sure about administering them. Im not sure how the live@edu bakcups work. I think that your safe from the worry of a server crash, or a HD failure like you would if you had your own server, but if someone was to ask for an email from 7th March 2009 that they deleted in August 2009, (for example) I dont think live@edu gives you any option to retrieve something like that (although I cuold be mistaken)

Best thing I can suggest is to get in tough with a local MS live@edu delpoyment consultants, who are really helpful and give great advice..

Perhaps a place to look might be Live@edu Support ?

[AntiThesis]

Our static IPs go away at the end of September and my line gets upgraded... and I'm leaning more towards the same kind of solution as RabbieBurns.

Only thing is, our staff are running on Kerio Mailserver at present. It's a handy enough piece of kit - just sits and runs quietly to itself. The question is... do I shift them over to live@edu or leave them be and just use live for the kids.

Decisions...

[CraigM]

We host our own mail using Exchange 2007. Roughly 1130 students and 75 staff. Everyone has a mail account, but not all students make use of it, or their accounts are disabled due to them not returning AUP forms. We have a 2mb uncapped ADSL line, and have not had any major issues with mail since we migrated to Exchange in December last year.

Live@Edu looks like a pretty powerful solution, I would suggest perhaps starting a trial with kids first. If it works out, you can later ditch the Kerio server, which means less power, cooling software costs.