UK Live@Edu Blog

Transport Rules

BenNunney — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:49:00 GMT

To celebrate Release 4 of Outlook Live, I’m creating a few screen casts of some of the best and most helpful new features we’ve introduced into the product. The first of these focuses on Transport Rules – how helpful they can be for compliance, how flexible they are, and the real power they give administrators to use the service in the way that works best for their institution. You can view and download the video below:

Announcing Outlook Live Release 4!

BenNunney — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:44:00 GMT

It doesn’t feel like long ago that I was sat in my summer clothes telling you all about R3 of Outlook Live – and yet here we are, 6 months later, pretending not to eat too many mince pies and talking about Outlook Live R4.

You won’t see a huge user experience change from R3 to R4, but there are a lot of new features and more enhanced admin tools for you to explore. Here’s a selection of some of the finer stocking-fillers that are new in Release 4:

Tasks – now in your browser

One of the biggest piece of UX feedback we got in R3 was that tasks weren’t available in the Outlook Live web interface.

We’ve brought them back into the fold for Release 4 – you once again have full task functionality through the browser, Outlook client, and anywhere you connect using Exchange ActiveSync.

Working better on even more platforms

Release 3 introduced our solid cross-platform story, supporting Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari on both Windows and Mac OS X.

In Release 4 we take that story one step further, introducing full user experience support for Firefox running on Linux based operating systems. This cross-browser, cross-platform compatibility means we cover almost all education usage scenarios – Live@edu works for your institution, whatever setup you have.

IMAP Migration Tools

Some of the most common conversations we have with customer are around migrating existing mail from legacy systems. We’ve always had POP migration, but with the new IMAP mail migration tools you can keep an entire mailbox’s folder structure completely intact. The tool works on a bulk administrator level (e.g. you can migrate your entire institution) or on an end user level (much the same way as POP subscriptions worked previously).

Transport Rules

One of the biggest additions to the administrative side of the service in R4 - with Transport Rules, administrators and compliance officers can establish and enforce enterprise, governmental and legal requirements on internal or outbound e-mail, through a flexible e-mail flow control and policy engine. For example, rules can be written that make a copy of messages to another mailbox or SMTP address, append a disclaimer to any message being sent externally, or prohibit students from sending e-mail with social security numbers within. As with most of the Outlook Live service, you can administer Transport Rules in the way that makes most sense to you – using PowerShell, or using the intuitive user interface within the Exchange Control Panel.

Enhancements, Enhancements, Enhancements

Release 4 isn’t just new features and new tools – we’ve enhanced a lot of the existing administration tools to make them more powerful and more easy to use. The cross-mailbox search functionality has been improved – making it even easier to be standards compliant. RBAC (Role based access control) functionality has been improved, helping you share the administrative workload to helpdesks and site-based admin teams throughout your institution(s), and have made access to the service through PowerShell even easier, too.

What do I need to do?

The upgrade process has already started – and by now, all of your administrator accounts should have been upgraded to R4. The easiest way to tell is by signing into your administrator mail account and looking at your branding. If you’re using ‘Outlook Web App’ then you’re on R4 (see image to the right), but if you’re on Outlook Live Beta, you’re on R3. User accounts will be upgraded systematically between now and the end of January.

As an administrator, there are a couple of things you need to think about. Firstly, you can now use the full RTM release of PowerShell 2.0 to connect to the service. This is great news for everyone, as we’re now on the full release of PowerShell that ships with Windows 7, and is compatible with XP, Vista, Server 2003 and above.

If you’re using ILM and GalSync/ELMA, you have until March 2010 to upgrade to the latest management agent. Don’t worry though – we’ll give you more details very shortly, and will have some great upgrade paths in place for you.

Last but not least…

We’ve built a lot of your feedback into Release 4 of Outlook Live – we want to make a product that does what you want and need it to do! Keep telling us what you think of the product and where you’d like it to go by joining in the conversation at www.outlookliveanswers.com, and keep checking the UK blog for more information!

How did Brockenhurst do it?

Rayfl — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:41:00 GMT

In what seems to be a regular event, I want to share another customer story with you. This time it's Brockenhurst College - situated in the New Forrest, it has 3,000 sixth form students and 9,000 adult learners to provide a service for.

Since deploying Live@edu, Brockenhurst have seen is that student use of their email service has gone from almost none to over 70% of students using it with anytime, anywhere access. And the college and students benefit from the wider collaboration that has resulted from the service.

Robin Gadd, who’s the college Head of Information and Systems Development, put it bluntly:

Providing technology that reflects what students use socially increases their perception of the college as a modern educational institution.

Click here to read the full case study, and see how Brockenhurst did it!

Brand Me Happy

BenNunney — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:42:00 GMT

Hi there! My name is Huw Michael – I’m an infrastructure technical architect for Royal Holloway, University of London. The cloud services guys at Microsoft asked me to write a blog post describing our motivation and experiences in migrating to Outlook Live, and specifically providing some hints on branding the end user interface.

Our institution made a strategic decision to outsource the student email service to Outlook Live in order to enhance the student email offering, provide a lifelong email facility to students, and drive out cost. Although there are other fish in the free service marketplace we were drawn to Microsoft for their enterprise messaging pedigree and also the strong partner & community support that’s available for implementation and migration.

Achieving a timely and successful delivery of the new service was vital to our strategic and financial goals and also our reputation as an IT Department. With the Microsoft solution we were able to deliver our project on time and on budget. We were helped by the following:

· Strong tool support for provisioning and password synchronisation

· Generous information sharing within the Higher Education community

· 1^st rate consultancy and support on provisioning and identity management from Microsoft partner Oxford Computer Group

· Open source software for Single Sign On integration

· Microsoft’s free technical support for the Outlook Live platform

Having initiated our project in early June, we were able to deliver an Outlook Live email service to 3,000 newly enrolled students in early August with the following features:

· Automated provisioning of mailbox accounts to Outlook Live using Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) and GALSync 2010, triggered by account creation in Active Directory, using control attributes in AD to manage scope and status

· Two way GAL synchronisation (on site Exchange 2003 to Outlook Live and back) using the same mechanism as above

· One way password synchronisation (AD to Outlook Live) using Password Change Notification Services (PCNS) and ILM

· Custom branding of the premium web interface

· Single Sign On to the web client from our Open Access PC labs using the SSO toolkit

· Single Sign on to the web client from our Sungard Luminus web portal using the St John’s University Luminis SSO kit

All of the above came together to give us a nicely joined up service – most of our staff don’t even know that 1^st year students are using Outlook Live and so far we have had a very positive experience. Calls to our helpdesk from 1^st year students regarding email issues have hit an all time low and feedback on the Outlook Live service has been encouraging. The next step in our project is to migrate all other students to Outlook Live. Before commencing this we are investigating methods for migrating Exchange mailbox content into the cloud.

The other thing I promised to talk about was branding the premium web client. You can see a screenshot of our efforts below:

The branding was a bit fiddly as the recommended sizes didn’t quite work without encroaching on the rest of the page; so after a lot of experimenting we decided that we needed to make two graphics.

The first is the branding bar main image and this needs to be 83px high and around 900px wide. The length is less important and should be decided based on your expected end-user resolution. In the Co-Branding UI this is called the “Branding Bar Background Image”. Our own image is shown below:

The second is the background image that repeats across the top of the page, and on which the main image sits. As it is repeated it only needs to be 1px wide but must be 83px high. In the Co-Branding UI this is called the “Branding Bar”.

The main branding bar image actually floats centrally depending on browser resolution and so the main worry is in getting it to look seamless wherever it ends up on the background image. This was achieved by first creating the main image and then creating a background image of approximately the same width; both were 83px high.

We then copied and pasted a small section of this background image over either end of the main image. These layers were then carefully blended by deleting the inner facing sides with a soft brush, being careful not to delete close to the outer edges.

Once complete the main image was saved and uploaded. The original background image was then cropped to be only 1px wide and also uploaded.

The diagram below illustrates this approach:

The following screenshot shows the relevant section of our co-branding screen in the Admin Center / Service Management Portal.

As a final touch we also added our corporate logo to replace the standard Outlook Live logo and amended the text on the LHS of the branding bar. The screenshot below shows the configuration and the results of all these settings can be seen in the Outlook Live premium web client screenshot above.

An Interview with Edinburgh Napier University…

BenNunney — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:40:30 GMT

Edinburgh Napier University prides itself on being progressive, regularly doing things differently. They are in the top ten for graduate employability in the UK , it’s an approach that seems to be working. In another blog post dedicated to the voice of our UK Live@edu customers, our very own Chris Rothwell caught up with Scott Walkingshaw, Napier’s Project Manager for Live@edu, to see how changing the university’s email service is helping progress...

CR: Tell me why you moved to Live@edu?
SW: We aim to provide IT services that are student focussed, relevant to their current lifestyle and flexible. We believed that the features and young and fresh look offered by Live@edu met that criteria. Features such as 10Gb disk space, blogs, wikis and Skydrive are all very relevant to todays student.

CR: Did you look at any other solutions besides Live@edu?
SW: Yes... we looked at other solutions, but the students were already using Outlook Web Access. We were very familiar with what Live@edu offered, so it was the natural choice. Any other solution would have been a step backwards.

CR: So implementing Live@edu felt like a natural progression for you?
SW: Yes, you could say that.

CR: Having read a little bit about Edinburgh Napier, you’re quite a progressive university, was implementing Live@edu part of this approach?
SW: Yes, I think it certainly was. It’s definitely in our mindset to remain current and offer our students a competitive edge.

CR: What about maintaining service – was integration with your existing systems important?
SW: Absolutely, Live@edu had to integrate with the services we had. For example, students have a central, single point of access through our student portal which provides single sign on to access multiple student applications. Live@edu had to integrate with these – it did – and meant that we could successfully implement single sign on for the Live@edu mailbox and the Live@edu applications – so it’s very integrated into what we have. The most important feature for us is a single address book and mailing lists for staff and students.

CR: You deployed Live@edu using Identity Lifecycle Manager, how did that go?
SW: The requirement was for us to take accounts from our student record system to populate Live@edu, so it had to be automatic. We worked with Oxford Computer Group to implement this.Since going live we’ve gone through a number of phases in terms of encouraging students to opt in – all have gone really well. For example, at Easter time we migrated 4,500 students which was very successful As of 1st of October 2009 we now have all our student email on Live@edu

CR: That’s great news. So how long have you been working with Live@edu?
SW: We decided to go ahead in March 2008 and were ready to go live by the time we had new admissions in September 2008.

CR: What about the future, what else are you planning to roll out through Live@edu?
SW: The next stage of the project is to promote many of the other services that Live@edu offers. first we need to understand how students can take advantage of these services in their student and personal lives, as well as how we can align the services for teaching.

Need a little time?

BenNunney — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:56:00 GMT

We are extending the deadline for signing up to the ‘Organisational Terms of Use’ for your domains"!

For those customers who have yet to sign up to the new Terms of Use and want to, you now have until 5pm on Friday 25th September to visit the website and click ‘I Accept’ for all domains that you wish to upgrade.

What is the Organisational TOU?

The ‘Org-Owned’ service introduces new features and administrative capabilities for Outlook Live that provides significant administrative flexibility, and is now the default feature set for all new Live@edu customers who select Outlook Live.

Highlights of Live@edu Organization include:

Multi-mailbox search provides a method to search for e-mail messages and other electronic communication sent and received by people in your organization.
Streamlined on-boarding experience for users lets users start to use Outlook Live immediately, without having to accept terms of use or receive parental consent.
Transport Rules are organization-wide rules that an administrator can use to control the flow of e-mail messages inside, and into and out of their organization.

Why do I need to sign a new TOU?

The features that are included with Live@edu Organization change the underlying data ownership model and contract relationship with Microsoft. Therefore, all existing customers must sign a new Terms of Use agreement (TOU) before we can enable Live@edu Organization for your domains.

What do I need to do?

Click here to be taken to the org-owned TOU website. From there, you simply need to sign in with your admin account and click ‘I Accept’. If you have domains under several different admin accounts, you’ll need to sign in to each separately. Please note, it takes 7-10 working days for the migration to be complete.

If you do not follow the steps above before Friday 25th September, you will be unable to do so until Spring 2010!

What Makes an Email Address?

BenNunney — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:44:04 GMT

Some customers say it’s a student’s name. Some say it’s the student number. Others go for a combination of name, year of birth, and how many pets they have. Almost every customer asks the same question when planning their Live@edu deployment – how should I format student’s email addresses?

The truth here is that there’s no set way that you have to format the email addresses – the bit before the domain can be whatever you want it to be. That said, there are several ‘best practice’ considerations:

Simplicity

You’ve just set up Live@edu as your new email system – so now you want students to actually use the service, right? A memorable, simple and personally identifiable address helps with this – a student will be much more likely to want to give out their student email address (and indeed remember their logon ID) if it’s an address they feel proud of. Combinations of joe.blogs or j.bloggs suffixed with the year of enrolment or another such number to ensure every address is unique often works well here.

Aliases & SMTP Addresses

Outlook Live allows you to set email aliases and more than one SMTP address. If you want to have something more formal as the Windows Live ID that students log in with, then this is a very good option. You can set every single user’s LiveID to be the same as their unique student number, but then specify a joe.bloggs style alias, and make that the primary SMTP address so that a student still has their ‘friendly’ email address while you get to maintain a uniquely identifiable Login / Live ID.

Single Sign-On

Using Single Sign-On does eliminate the worry around a login – given as students would automatically be logged into their Outlook Live / Live@edu account automatically when they log into your portal or such like. Beware of addresses here – will a student be expecting their email address to be the same as their network login? If it is – is it a friendly enough address?

Choice

There really is no right or wrong way to go with email address format. I see a lot of customers choosing the alias & SMTP address option – and it seems to work well for both students and IT teams. Whatever the choice, it’s very hard to change your mind after you’ve deployed a lot of users – so it’s well worth building the email address format decision into your Live@edu planning process!

Hello, Moodle!

BenNunney — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:07:44 GMT

The Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle

I’m very pleased to be able to announce a whole new way to integrate Live@edu into your virtual learning environment! This plug-in is a free download that provides integrated access to Live@edu services such as e-mail, calendar, instant messaging and search within the Moodle environment.

This newly integrated experience is accessible via a single username and password. We believe this experience will enable more teachers and students to quickly and easily access the Live@edu resources they already use to efficiently communicate, collaborate and learn. Best of all – just like Moodle it’s completely free, and licensed under the GPL v2 agreement – so you can go and grab the code, play with it, develop on top of it, and get it to work with your existing system however you want it to!

This is the start of something big from us here at Microsoft. The Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle is the first in a growing collection of free, easy-to-deploy solutions – some completely turnkey, others requiring some level of customization –available on www.educationlabs.com that showcase our latest work on new and exciting learning scenarios. On this site, you can learn more about the plug-in and access the download today.

Check out what Moodle creator Martin Dougiamas has to say about the Live Services Plug-in on his blog. Last but not least, you can download the code here and start using it right away!

Here’s a video demonstration of the Microsoft Live Services Plug-in in action…

From the Horse’s Mouth…

BenNunney — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:05:00 GMT

This is the first in a series of posts where I hand the reigns of the blog over to one of our customers. I’ve invited James Mason, Senior Portal Developer at the University of Chichester, to (in his own words) “mess up the Blog with some illiterate rambling about our recent implementation of Live@edu”. So, over to James…

Background

The University of Chichester is a small, modern University with approximately 8,500 live accounts. We are predominantly a Novell (Linux) based network with a smattering of Windows Servers to run SQL databases and Windows XP on the desktop. We had recently completed a project to virtualise many of our servers, and we had the capacity to create some more virtual servers as well. Novell has an application called “iChain” (latest version is Novell Access Manager) which we use as a reverse-proxy sitting in front of our web based services. This provides additional security, load balancing, access control lists and single sign-on. The University has a portal system, Luminis IV which includes the SunONE e-mail and calendar software. When on-site, users log onto their PC’s and are automatically (through iChains) logged onto the portal and then are subsequently able to access a variety of tools without any subsequent logins. Externally, people access the portal through our main website, log on to iChains and are then treated as being “on site”.

In September ‘08, the University set up a Project Board with the mandate of finding a new e-mail and calendar system for students AND staff. This system would need to fit seamlessly into our portal, offer a far better user experience and be more robust but would not lose any of the benefits of the integrated system (ability for lecturers to e-mail their classes or send targeted announcements for example)

Choosing the new mail system

First order of the day was to look at the competition. In the end we narrowed the choice down to:

1) Do nothing - A PRINCE2 requirement :-)

2) Microsoft Exchange – the benchmark to compare the alternatives to

3) GroupWise – Novell’s e-mail system that could integrate to our systems easily

4) Google Mail – A very popular system with the benefit of being free

5) Live@edu – Microsoft’s answer to Google Mail with Exchange in the background

This all sounds well and good, but the University had a fly for our ointment. No budget. Everyone wanted the mail system changed (we could only provide 100MB of mail space), but nobody was willing to pay for it. The only resource provided was to IT personnel as and when they were available. Given that, options 1, 2 and 3 were not viable, although we kept them as a way to gauge the viability of the other options.

And to be honest, there was not a lot to choose between Google Mail and Live@edu. They both have fully featured mail and calendar tools plus a whole host of applications that can benefit both students and lecturers.

In the end we chose (drum roll, please) Live@edu (surprised?). This was because:

· The UI look and feel was more professional

· We are an Office 2007 site, something Google didn’t support yet

· We felt Microsoft had a more professional approach with road maps, upgrade paths and support

· It would take less development time (read expense) to integrate Live@edu

Installation

To make this work, we required the following:

1) An automatic way to maintain accounts

2) Single sign on

3) Modification to our portal to change mail systems

4) Not changing any current e-mail address

5) Migration of information

Microsoft supply multiple ways of solving the first part, but if you want to synchronise passwords then their best solution is ILM (Identity Lifecycle Manager). They also provide a piece of kit that can single sign on to any part of Live@edu. However, both require Active Directory. So our first step was to install a couple of virtual domain controllers and populate them from our eDirectory tree using Novell’s Identity Manager. A simple install of ILM and IIS got us up and running (I know nothing about either IIS and was still able to get this running as needed within the day). The modifications to our portal were relatively straightforward.

However, the major headache was due to our decision not to change e-mail addresses (fredbloggs@chi.ac.uk had to exist on the new AND old mail systems). This meant that we had to create the chi.ac.uk domain on Live@edu but we could not activate it (by pointing MX records at it) until our “go live” date. We could, however, pre-create the accounts in our domain. So, we had e-mail accounts in both our old mail system and Live@edu.

Our last challenge was going to be how to migrate data from the old mail system to the new. Here it was Outlook 2007 that solved our problems. We could automatically set Outlook 2007 to link into both the old and new systems and enable users to just drag and drop their mail as needed. We created a “Frequently Asked Questions” page with annotated videos to help people with this process (http://help.chi.ac.uk/FrequentlyAskedQuestions.cfm).

Going Live

The e-mail accounts we created in Live@edu were ready and available for staff, even though the domain wasn’t technically active. We used this to our advantage by running training sessions for staff BEFORE we went live. This enabled us to ensure that the accounts, passwords and personal details had all been created correctly and reduced the risk of lost e-mail. We only created 10,000 accounts of which there were about 500 full time staff accounts. The sessions were short (one hour maximum) and we sold the idea to staff with the carrot of a “preview of the upcoming mail changes” and stick of “if you do not attend, your mail is AT RISK”. This way, we got approximately 80% of staff to attend and solved the major issues before we went live.

The go live date (23 May) was very smooth. All the systems were already in place and all we had to do was change the MX records to point to the new mail system and restart the portal services (to activate the changes). Within 15 minutes we were on the new mail system.

That’s not the end, though. Live@edu contains far more than just e-mail and calendar. We didn’t want to overload our staff with new information, so we decided to have a phased rollout. This was helped with us supplying access to the new tools through our portal. So, on 23 May we only linked in the mail and calendar. We are in the process of rolling out SkyDrive, Messenger and the other tools at monthly intervals. Of course, users could access all of these tools already if they know the URL’s but that is unlikely in our environment.

The End…?

For two weeks after we rolled out the new mail system, our Helpdesk was inundated with questions, complaints and…praise. Yes, you read that right. People actually took time to applaud the new system. Sure, there are quirks, changes and (of course) actual bugs but these are mainly resolved with either a bit of training or passing the job onto Microsoft’s support (the benefits of an outsourced solution).

Officially we are not closing this project until all the tools provided have been delivered (with the support in place) and the students have returned for the next academic year. We also have to decide on how we deal with the “e-mail for life” issue – we would love to provide this service, but at the same time we do not want ex-students being in the global address book.

Obviously, this is a very brief synopsis of all the work that went on (both by the University and Microsoft) but in general, for such a large change for the University, this has been a relatively painless process. We were fortunate in having some systems in place already (namely iChain, Luminis, Identity Manager and VMWare) but that made up for the lack of specialist skills that are simply too expensive for a small University.

You can view the training resources that the University of Chichester have created to help with adoption of the service by visiting http://help.chi.ac.uk/OutlookLive.cfm.

Introducing GalSync

BenNunney — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:11:00 GMT

The new version of GalSync (formerly ELMA) is now available!

Version three of our management agent for ILM has now been released, and goes under the new name of GalSync. Formerly called ELMA (for Exchange Labs Management Agent), the name change not only reflects the move to Outlook Live from Exchange Labs, but brings a significant improvement to the installation, setup and use of ILM with Outlook Live and Live@edu.

What’s New?

We’ve worked really hard to make the whole process of using GalSync a lot smoother – so from first setup through to running the sync and setting up PNCS, there are now friendly wizard screens that let you get set up within an AD infastructure out of the box! There’s also more and better documentation than we’ve had with any previous release of the management agent, and GalSync is fully supported through the Live@edu support portal.

Do I have to upgrade from ELMA v2?

No – not at all. The current plan is to move all customers (ELMA v2 and GalSync v3) to GalSync v4, once released (Q4 2009). There will be a well communicated grace period before customers have to move, and actually due to some of the changes it's likely that R2 customers will be given more time.

Where do I go to get stuff?

The full GalSync documentation can be found at http://help.outlook.com/en-gb/140/dd575560.aspx, and a handy guide to upgrading from ELMA v2 can be found at http://help.outlook.com/en-gb/140/dd819113.aspx. To obtain the software, get in touch with your deployment partner or drop your account representative an email!

The Ultimate Answer…

BenNunney — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:12:00 GMT

While 42 is generally accepted as the answer to life, the universe, and everything, it doesn’t really help when you type it into PowerShell. That’s why we’ve launched a brand new service for customers to get together, post questions, search through issues that other customers are having and check on the status of the service.

Outlook Live Answers is a fantastic community for Live@edu customers on the Outlook Live platform. It’s already being used to help customers around the globe to share common issues, resources, answers, solutions and general comments about the service. It’s staffed by a trusty bunch of Microsofties from all four corners of the globe – so your issue will be seen by people whatever time of day you post it.

Head over to http://www.outlookliveanswers.com and start posting!

Fighting Phish and Eating Spam…

BenNunney — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:40:00 GMT

I want to talk about spam. Once a versatile wartime merging of meats, it’s fast become the scourge of our inboxes. Last year alone, more than 60 trillion junk messages were sent, using enough energy to power a city almost the size of London. Each message accounts for 0.3g of CO2 = the equivalent of driving 90cm = putting an extra 3.1million cars on the road.

I get a lot of people asking me about our filtering systems and policies. Live@edu customers enjoy ‘IP Whitelisting’ to help cut down on the number of legitimate emails caught by our spam filters, but what does this mean? And what happens if you think there’s a problem?

In order to fight the scourge of spammers, we make use of a number of tools. Utilising the SenderID framework, an IP Reputation system, and our own secret-recipe-solution called SmartScreen, we block over 95% of all spam sent to Hotmail, Outlook Live and other Microsoft email platforms.

But what if you think legitimate mail from your University/School/College is getting blocked? There are 5 initial steps that you can take:

1. Go to main address for spam problems : http://postmaster.live.com

2. Ensure compliance/check guidelines on http://mail.live.com/mail/policies.aspx

3. Check best practices/FAQs on http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx

4. Adopt SenderID on http://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsmsbl&page=support_home_options_form_byemail&ct=eformts

5. Join the Postmaster services: http://mail.live.com/mail/services.aspx

From there, you can submit your issue directly using the fast and easy online JMRP (Junk Mail Reporting Programme) tool at https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsjmrpp&page=support_home_options_form_byemail&ct=eformts.

We’ll move quickly once you’ve reported the problem – and as long as we’re not seeing high volume of actual spam from your institution, it shouldn’t take long before things are back to normal. There are always instances where an institution is sending out a high volume of spam (due to a Phishing attach or otherwise) and aren’t aware of it. We’re here to help with that too – we’ll do out best to tell you everything we can about why your mail was blocked.

What happens when the block is lifted, I hear you ask. As a policy, we don’t delete email – so anything that was blocked will slowly filter through. Some of it may end up in the Junk Email folder, so it’s always best to advise your users to check there in the wake of a spam outage.

Don’t Lose It!

BenNunney — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:26:00 GMT

One of the Windows Live services that you can access as part of Live@edu is Office Live Workspaces. This is a great place to collaborate and share Office documents within your campus. Here’s a great video put together by our Office Live Workspaces team to highlight quite how handy a tool it can be…

Sharing is good…

BenNunney — Sun, 10 May 2009 13:41:00 GMT

One of the most requested features for Live@edu was the ability to have an on-premises messaging system and Outlook Live domain share the same domain suffix. So, for example, I want to keep my staff on premise but outsource my students to Live@edu – but I want to keep them both on the testington.org.uk domain, rather than having students.testington.org.uk and staff.testington.org.uk domains.

With release 3 of Outlook Live this became possibly and easily achievable by using what we call a Shared Address Space. It’s something you need to plan to do from the offset – but if you go into enrolment knowing you want a shared address space, you only have five easy steps to follow! This diagram shows a typical shared namespace setup:

As you can see, the MX records still point to your on premise system and mail is then routed out to the ‘live’ domain. In this example, the five steps are:

1. Enroll the live.contoso.edu domain

2. Add contoso.edu as an accepted domain

3. Configure contoso.edu as an internal relay domain

4. Create Outlook Live accounts with a primary e-mail address in the contoso.edu domain

5. Create an internal relay on on-premise system.

Full instructions on setting up a shared address space can be found by clicking here!

Software + Services

BenNunney — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:29:00 GMT

You may hear us talk about our Software + Services Strategy when we talk about Live@edu, Windows Live, and our Live Services Platform. It embodies our broader thinking as a company, especially in regard to products like Outlook Live and Windows Live, and is something we are very passionate about.

But what is Software + Services? Check out the video below for an overview…