Curtin Uni picks Microsoft Live@edu

Curtin University has decided to put its 192,000 students and alumni onto Microsoft's hosted Live@edu email system and will be migrating them over this month.

Peter Nikoletatos
(Credit: Curtin University)

Curtin currently delivers email to its 42,000 students via Sun's iPlanet. "It was robust, but it was a basic email system," Curtin University CIO Peter Nikoletatos told ZDNet.com.au. He believed student needs had moved beyond that, to encompass features such as integrated calendaring and collaborative spaces.

Students will now not only have larger 10GB inboxes, but will be able to use Microsoft Outlook Live, Microsoft Office Live Workspace, SkyDrive storage, Windows Live Messenger and File Sharing, Windows Live spaces as well as FolderShare, which allows users to synchronise files between devices and other users. The services will be free of charge, according to Nikoletatos.

Despite this, Microsoft's win has set it up for future cash inflows, with Nikoletatos considering using the email system for staff as well. "This is a starting point. We're also going to explore in the fullness of time the whole email solution for our whole organisation. We would expect that would be a commercial arrangement," he said.

Nikoletatos hoped to do a feasibility study in the first half of 2010 which would look at what the organisation was currently doing in terms of storage and virtualisation. It has seen a "significant rise" in research data, he said, and expected more due to the university's involvement in the data-rich square kilometre array project.

The information from that study would be taken to a management committee by the end of 2010 with the view to possibly implement something in 2011.

The university has also been busy in other arenas including moving from a decentralised IT environment to a shared services type model, working on enterprise content management, making wireless ubiquitous across the university and working on a smartphone project.