Vote My Story, Microsoft nabs 465,000 user Live@edu deployment

Microsoft is now the e-mail, calendaring and instant messaging provider for students of the State University of New York (SUNY).

SUNY's 64 campuses are now part of a university-wide Live@edu agreement that covers more than 465,000 students with Microsoft's online productivity suite. Besides the aforementioned tools, this includes things like online storage, video conferencing, and access to Microsoft's Office Web Apps--all of which are offered up free of charge.

In a post announcing the roll out, Microsoft's US CTO Cameron Evans, said that the deal is saving Monroe Community College--one of the SUNY schools involved with the program--$600,000 over five-years. That money, Evans said, would be spent on making the campus "greener."

SUNY's implementation of Live@edu is one of the largest yet, though overshadowed by the London Grid for Learning's deployment in 2009, which offered the free suite of online tools to more than 1 million students. A close second is the Kentucky Department of Education, which earlier this year moved 700,000 users to Live@edu. Interestingly enough, that move took Kentucky off the on-premises Microsoft Exchange Servers and into Microsoft's cloud instead.

Prior to the agreement, Microsoft says some 70,000 SUNY students were using Live@edu. The other 395,000 or so will presumably be moved over in the first few months of 2011.