For schools, colleges and universities looking for a powerful tool for their students to help them better collaborate on group projects, SkyDrive and Office Web Apps is the ideal solution.
Those looking for a web based solution often think about Google Docs. While tools such as this may work well for simple tasks, they may not have the features you need to create professional documents. You can also have formatting issues when you move between these apps and Office.
You could also use a “file cloud” like Dropbox, but these tools aren’t really designed for collaboration, and they don’t let you work simultaneously with others on a document.
Faced with these choices, many people decide to work independently and email files back and forth. This makes it hard to know if you’re working on the latest version of a document, and sometimes you can run into attachment limits. It also can take a lot of time to piece together different Word documents or PowerPoint presentations from multiple email messages.
With SkyDrive, you have a better option. Students can store all their files in one place, so everyone can access the latest version. They can also use free Office Web Apps for basic editing from any browser.
More specifically, SkyDrive and Office Web Apps allow you to more easily manage the following:
SkyDrive and Office Web Apps make sharing easy. Learn more about how your students can start embracing these powerful tools, also offered as part of Live@edu, today.
By Tim Bush
totally disagree with the sharingpoints raised. sharing on skydrive is so much more difficult now since the recent update (dec 2011). the fact the the GAL is totally seperated from SkyDrive. The fact that Skydrive can't access the GAL it like when you click on to: and see a list of people in the address book when composing an email makes sharing very cumbersone. now I type an email address and the email address only pops up if i have previously shared with that person, i should not have to remebe the email address of who i want to share with when sharing. Schools often have groups/classes bigger than 20, but you can't have an adhoc +20 group of people sharing in SkyDrive, you goota make a group, more time taken away from what I want to do. Access to your Messenger IM contacts (aka you GAL for SkyDrive)has been removed and this made sharing easy, a similar or equivalent feature is desperately needed.