Microsoft



-731965-895796-457200-457200Late homework excuses vapourised with cloud-based student email and storage.“It would have cost us several hundred thousand dollars to roll-out email for 66,000 students ourselves, and schools would still have had to employ staff to support it.”Warren Armitage, Chief Information Office, Brisbane Catholic EducationWith overall responsibility for 134 schools, Brisbane Catholic Education wanted to improve student-teacher communications. Staff thought that if teachers could easily contact all students by email, then scheduling and timetabling would become much easier, particularly if student identities could be grouped according to the classes they were in. However, integrating approximately 66,000 individual email addresses into the organisation’s student database presented a daunting challenge. Brisbane Catholic Education considered creating email accounts for students itself, and providing access through its own wide area network, but the development, maintenance and infrastructure costs would have exceeded A$100,000.In September 2010, Brisbane Catholic Education started to deploy Microsoft? Live@edu, a complimentary, cloud-based Microsoft? Outlook? mail service that students access through online portals. School deployments required no on-site technical assistance or ongoing support. Students get complimentary cloud storage, while Brisbane Catholic Education has avoided investing in new infrastructure.Brisbane Catholic EducationIndustry: EducationLocation:Queensland, AustraliaOrganisation size:66,000 StudentsOrganisation ProfileBrisbane Catholic Education owns, manages or oversees administration at 134 schools in the Archdiocese of Brisbane. Staff are responsible for maintaining student and scheduling data on the 66,000 students who attend catholic schools in the archdiocese, and for deploying some intra-school information systems.Business SituationThe community’s head office wanted email to be a more effective mode of communication within schools. Specifically, staff believed that teaching schedules and classroom information would be better communicated if they could be targeted at specific classes and groups by email.SolutionBrisbane Catholic Education deployed Microsoft? Live@edu, a free cloud-based email service. Email accounts are auto-generated from the central student information database and mail is delivered direct to students’ home pages on Microsoft? SharePoint? portals.Benefits? Minimum cost; maximum flexibility? Ease of administration? More integrated digital learning ? More reliable homework storage32992704107815-660400728535“Students interact with teachers and classmates using email, blogs and wikis, and co-operate on special assignments using PowerPoint. The collaboration in SharePoint is just great and they love it.”Warren Armitage, Chief Information Office, Brisbane Catholic EducationBusiness NeedsBrisbane Catholic Education is a faith-based community of 134 independent and diocesan schools in the Queensland Archdiocese of Brisbane. The organisation’s head office executes a variety of functions on behalf of individual schools. These include setting curricula, policy formulation and admissions.Although Brisbane Catholic Education does not purchase technology for individual schools, the organisation’s IT staff do manage some data and systems on their behalf. This means Brisbane Catholic Education has an interest in helping schools take advantage of new technologies.“We wanted to encourage email because we thought it could improve class management and communication,” says Warren Armitage, Chief Information Office, Brisbane Catholic Education. “If every student had an email identity, and those identities could be grouped into classes and other groups, then lots of school communication could be easily targeted. School organisation would become a lot simpler.”Brisbane Catholic Education could theoretically deploy an email system for every one of its 134 schools because it maintained the central student enrolment information database. Unfortunately, Brisbane Catholic Education simply did not have the resources either to manage 66,000 email addresses. “Even if we could have got 66,000 student email addresses into our database system, how would we maintain them?” asks Armitage. “Students are constantly changing their email addresses, so it would have been a never-ending nightmare.”In January 2010, Armitage began looking for a feasible way of rolling out email to all the schools in the Brisbane Catholic Education community. “I had three criteria,” says Armitage. “The first was speed. We wanted to take full advantage of the Federal Government’s 1:1 laptop program. The second was cost. There was no existing budget for a community-wide email service, and there was going tobe no major new source of funding for it.“Third, we wanted an email system that could integrate with other platforms we were developing for students. In particular, we wanted to start deploying Microsoft Office SharePoint. Our idea was that schools would create their own SharePoint portals as central tools of school communications. Students would log on, and get access to all vital school information as well as blogs and wikis.”SolutionArmitage reviewed the Microsoft? Live@edu complimentary cloud-based email service, specifically designed for schools and other education service providers. “Live@edu integrates with SharePoint and with Active Directory, which we already used to manage logon identities for teachers and staff,” says Armitage. “I also spoke to a contact in an education organisation in the US that deployed 500,000 email accounts in one weekend, so I know Live@edu can be deployed quickly.”“Most importantly, Microsoft doesn’t charge customers for using Live@edu,” he adds. “And since they also host it, we wouldn’t have to manage it ourselves.”In June 2010, Brisbane Catholic Schools decided to deploy Live@edu, and asked Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, OBS, to help them manage the process.“The attraction with Microsoft’s cloud-based email is flexibility: we can tailor the solution to individual customers, and the issues and opportunities they face.” says Denis Hawkins, Consultant, OBS.Deployment was bundled with a new student administration system based on Microsoft? Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) 2007 as well as Microsoft? Office SharePoint? 2010 for the school portals, and a new finance system based on Microsoft Dynamics? AX.“Student names are automatically fed from the central student database to ILM 2007,” says Hawkins. “This synchronises identities across different systems, in this case Live@edu and Active Directory, which students use to log on to SharePoint.”Email is fed straight into SharePoint 2010 using web-parts that embed individual email accounts into the school portal landing page. As soon as a student logs on to the school portal, their email appears straight away. “The beauty of this arrangement is that students only have to launch one application, and log on once,” says Armitage. “From there they get access to all their assignments arranged in SharePoint folders, as well as their own school email account. Students with laptops are also connected to Windows Live? Mesh 2011, which automatically backs up files into the cloud, synchronising versions in the process.”Deployment started in September 2010 with Brisbane Catholic Education creating email accounts for secondary school students who had just received a laptop. “The roll-out has been very easy so far,” says Armitage. “Previously we had to deploy applications school by school, but with ILM 2007, we have been able to deploy centrally. In fact the biggest hassle is just getting the consent forms from the students themselves.”BenefitsWith cloud-based Microsoft Live@edu, Brisbane Catholic Education has deployed an otherwise unaffordable email system. This helps school staff communicate more efficiently and helps students collaborate more creatively. Minimum cost; maximum flexibilityArmitage believes Live@edu has provided the schools in his area with a flexible email and collaboration system at minimal coast.“It would have cost us several hundred thousand dollars to roll out email for 66,000 students ourselves, and schools would still have had to employ staff to support it,” he says. “At the same time maintenance and infrastructure costs would have exceeded A$100,000.“Not only have we got complimentary email, we have created an equal playing field among schools. Some schools use Macs, for example. With Live@edu, no one gets a cut-down version of the email service or associated tools. Everyone gets SharePoint; everyone gets Live Mesh. The service is the same for everyone.”Ease of administrationHowever, for Armitage and his technical colleagues at Brisbane Catholic Education, the overriding benefit of Live@edu is its simplicity.“The main thing is that account administration is automated,” he says. “As soon as a student identity is created in ILM 2007, an email account is created and synchronised with that student’s logon. “This means we are freed from account administration – and not having to manage thousands of email accounts is a huge relief. We have had very positive feedback from the schools because the administration requirements for them are very low too.”Technical InformationSoftware and ServicesMicrosoft? Live@eduMicrosoft? Office SharePoint? 2010Microsoft? Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007Active Directory?Windows Live? Mesh 2011IT IssuesRolling out email accounts to 66,000 students and integrating email into personalised portals.More integrated digital learning By bundling email accounts into portals, teachers can be sure students will see messages whenever they log on. This makes email a more efficient way to organise classes and group-based activities on a day-by-day basis.“It greatly simplifies how schools can communicate, as these groups of student identities are already set up on our databases,” says Armitage. “Now teachers can compose one email and send it straight to everyone in that class, and know that they will get it and no-one else.”By integrating cloud-based email into SharePoint, Brisbane Catholic Education has also encouraged a more immersive and collegial studying environment. “Students interact with teachers and classmates using email, blogs and wikis, and co-operate on special assignments using PowerPoint,” adds Armitage. “The collaboration in SharePoint is just great and they love it.”More reliable homework storageFiles are also more reliably accessible. Windows Live Mesh automatically saves copies of students’ files up into the cloud. This means that homework and joint projects are always available with an Internet connection, regardless of where they were created or the device that was used. “As soon as a document is saved on a machine it is backed up to the cloud,” says Armitage. “If a student goes to another machine, then it is immediately accessible and there is no need to wander about with a USB.“This is both good and bad. Students can’t say ‘The dog ate my homework’ or even ‘a virus ate my homework.’ If the work has been done, it will be accessible in the cloud and there are no excuses.”Microsoft Product that was featured Microsoft Live@edu is a complimentary, cloud-based email service offered to schools and other teaching organisations. Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 is an identity-synchronisation tool that manages individuals’ identities within applications and databases. It includes certificate management and user provisioning.-388810314960Partner InformationOBS.auHead Office Melbourne?Level 9, 451 Little Bourke StreetMelbourne, VIC 3000 AustraliaPhone:??03?9606?9200For More Information For more information about Microsoft products and services call the sales and information line on 13 20 58 Monday to Friday 8am to 8pm AEST. To find a partner or solution, visit australia/findapartner/ This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published March 201114767-0311/Brisbane1390650327660 ................
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