The Challenge

Hosting of Live@edu is free and is a fantastic opportunity for any educational establishment. However, with thousands of accounts, how do you ensure you don’t create an administrative headache?

The technical challenge in moving to Live@edu is similar to the challenge you would face migrating your email to any other solution.

Whether to migrate existing mailbox content and how to do so?

Options include:

  • Only give Live@edu to new students
  • Use provided tools to script mail migration
  • Train students and staff to migrate the emails they want to keep
  • Build an advanced automation option

How do you route staff and student email differently? Your college may not wish to move staff mail to Live@edu?

The simplest way to achieve this is to implement Live@edu on a sub-domain of your college domain, for example stulive.college.ac.uk.

You can then route incoming and outgoing mail entirely separately.

How do you manage thousands of accounts with ongoing changes and a significant turnover of accounts on an annual basis?

The solution lies with integration. All account details should be managed in one database, which should then provide updates to Active Directory and Live@edu. Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) provides a framework to facilitate this.

How do you ensure user passwords in Live@edu are the same as Active Directory?

Microsoft provide an automated password synchronisation solution to ensure users’ Live@edu passwords are updated when AD account passwords are changed.

Later challenges

You may also need to integrate Live@edu with SharePoint and/or your VLE so students can see they have mail.

Don’t forget to market the new service to your students to tell them what it can offer as well as train staff to show them how collaborate with students

Useful links: