MSN in Higher Education
The other day I was involved in a live meeting with Microsoft Corp. to learn more about an offering from MSN for higher education.
MSN is offering to host universities' student email accounts, provide messenger functionality and blogging/e-folio capability via spaces at no charge to the university. To me, this is a really compelling story because it means that as a university there would be no storage, management or support costs involved in managing students email. The way this is done is by linking MIIS to the universities student ID store (AD,LDAP, NDS, Student Recordsystem etc....) and MIIS will then create a passport account with the address of:
student@university_name.ac.uk
This give the student an email address that is linked to the web brand of your university and I believe that this email address is for life so that means that from an Alumni perspective it makes for a great way to keep in touch.
MIIS can also populate the university's staff email address book with all the students email addresses so that staff will have full visibility and access to students contact details.
If you need more information please go to:
http://imagine-msn.com/university/
