email opinions and advice

[nit]

hey everyone,

 

I've took it upon myself to see what email solutions there are out there, Currently we don't control our email its all done at county level the gits even charge us £5 for a email new email address plus there calendar options are pretty poor. The boss she would love to have our own exchange server in house but we spending at of money at the moment on load of things so it might be out of the question. So i'm left with really google apps and Microsoft Live@edu, I'm liking google app as I use gmail as my own personal email and I love it but

is it really 'free'?

are there ad's?

is the good control? (e.g not letting the kids to send out bound emails, monitor what they are sending each other?)

can you create email lists?

is it any good for schools?

reliable (which county isn't sometimes)?

 

And the same question free for Microsoft Live@edu, or should we just wait until we can afford our own exchange server? but personal i rather see us move away from county email ASAP to be honest. Any advice or opinion would be great

 

Thanks

Nit

[elsiegee40]

Rather than Live@Edu, now you should be looking at Office 365 for schools which is free. It is ad free. My school is just starting out on the migration from RM EasyMail which costs far too much for what it does. Live@Edu users will be moved over to Office 365 in the next few months so there's no point starting with live@edu now.

 

Both Office 265 and Google Apps for Education are free, ad free, etc. If you search on these boards you will find plenty of threads on the pros and cons of both. At the end of the day it comes down to what suits the school best.

Edited March 28, 2012 by elsiegee40

[PiqueABoo]

Live@Edu users will be moved over to Office 365 in the next few months so there's no point starting with live@edu now.

 

My inner-cynic doubts the first bit. In principle it's Office365 for Education is broadly available in the (northern hemisphere) summer, but it was going to be available last year until it wasn't. If you can get it prior to the last day of the UK summer or earlier via some VIP advance access method, then yes there's no point kicking off a Live@Edu especially if the transition to Office365 will have you doing work recreating a few bits, having to reset everyone's passwords etc. Live@Edu migrations apparently happen *after* that broad availability, and unless this is miraculously different from everything else that happens to Live@Edu I'm expecting some kind of 'heavy engineering' that necessarily takes long periods of time e.g. there's something initially called the December 2011 service update for Live@Edu that still hasn't reached at least one UK school tenancy yet... and it's April 2012 in a few days.

 

[ I'm still waiting for an Office365 for Education catch, possibly something related to the sharepoint like there won't be out-of-box friendly templates for education after all or something. And how does that rumoured Office for Education 15 sharepoint app thingy fit in to all this? ]

 

--

 

Back to OPs question. The most compelling reason I can think of for local Exchange not cloud Exchange is if you have a significant number of Outlook 'power users' e.g. PA opening their own, the Head's, a couple of Deputies mailboxes and casually flitting between them - still works with cloud, but not as quickly, and some PAs can get scary when things like that happen.

Edited March 28, 2012 by PiqueABoo

[elsiegee40]

If, as I suspect, the LA solution is EasyMail... they've got b*gger all