Microsoft’S Live@Edu to Add SharePoint
Microsoft is filling out its free Live@edu service for schools with the addition of SharePoint Online. The service is expected to be added in the second half of 2010.
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In addition, Microsoft said in the past four months the Live@edu service has added 5,000 new schools, which has raised number of users of the service into the tens of millions. The announcements were made at the annual Educause conference, which focuses on technology in education.
Microsoft said SharePoint Online will be added in the second half of next year. The service, which has yet to be named, will run on SharePoint 2010, which is expected to ship in the first half of next year, around May or June. It will be free for Live@edu users.
"Students can create My Sites, share documents, create documents in the cloud and collaborate with teachers within an IT-managed solution," said Anna Kinney, director of the Live@edu program.
The SharePoint service will provide IT departments the ability to provision services as well as handle some backend duties such as compliance and decommissioning of sites, she said. The full IT feature set will be announced at a later date, Kinney said.
With the current version of SharePoint, IT has provisioning tools to control what features are available to end-users.
Beyond just sharing files and team collaboration, SharePoint 2010 is being positioned as a platform for developers and includes support for REST and ATOM APIs that can be used to support calls out to other Web 2.0 applications such as Twitter.
“We don’t have any immediate plans for SharePoint, but it is a pleasant announcement,” said John Adams, managing administrator for e-mail services at the University of Cincinnati. The school just completed its migration of 55,000 students to the Live@edu platform.
The school has a small internal rollout of SharePoint and is building a governance model around the platform that it hopes will help with its online deployment when SharePoint becomes available via Live@edu.
Microsoft plans to augment the SharePoint Online availability by adding access to Office Web Apps, the online iterations of its Office productivity applications. Live@edu customers have access to preview copies of those applications via Microsoft’s SkyDrive service.
Office Web Applications will give users the document creation and editing tools they need for collaborating, sharing information and integrating with other Microsoft services.
