Ninety Percent of University’s Students Adopt New Web ...



|Overview | | |“We deployed the hosted e-mail and communication services from Microsoft for students, and went from |

|Country or Region: United States | | |5 percent using our old service to 90 percent using Live@edu.” |

|Industry: Education | | |Dr. Michael Adelaine, Vice President of Information Technology, South Dakota State University |

| | | | |

|Customer Profile | | | |

|South Dakota State University (SDSU) has an | | | |

|enrollment of 11,400 students, with a | | | |

|student-to-teacher ratio of 17 to 1. The | | | |

|university has 650 faculty members. | | | |

| | | | |

|Business Situation | | | |

|The old-fashioned student e-mail service at | | | |

|SDSU was used by only 5 percent of the | | | |

|students. SDSU wanted to deploy a solution | | | |

|similar to that of the Web-based mail | | | |

|services that students preferred. | | | |

| | | | |

|Solution | | | |

|SDSU was the first university to deploy | | | |

|Microsoft® Live@edu, a set of hosted | | | |

|communication and collaboration services from| | | |

|Microsoft that meet the expectations of | | | |

|students and alumni. | | | |

| | | | |

|Benefits | | | |

|Increased campus e-mail use from 5 to 90 | | | |

|percent | | | |

|Improves students’ productivity | | | |

|Improves student/faculty communications | | | |

|Supports the reputation of being a close-knit| | | |

|campus | | | |

|Delivers preferred student e-mail services at| | | |

|less cost | | | |

| | | |Based in Brookings, South Dakota, South Dakota State University (SDSU) is well-known for its friendly|

| | | |campus community. However, SDSU’s in-house e-mail solution was unreliable and only 5 percent of |

| | | |students used it. The university began looking for a reliable, hosted, Web-based e-mail service that |

| | | |would be popular with students and enhance their communication with faculty and staff. When Microsoft|

| | | |released Microsoft® Live@edu, SDSU listened to its students’ preference for the Windows Live™ |

| | | |Hotmail® e-mail service and became the first university to sign on. With Live@edu, each student gets |

| | | |a Web-based e-mail account and security-enhanced instant messaging, blogging, and other online |

| | | |communication and collaboration services. Now SDSU students, faculty, and staff have a new way of |

| | | |staying connected that reinforces the feeling of community that is so highly valued by everyone on |

| | | |campus. |

| | | | |

| | | |[pic] |

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Situation

Founded in 1881, South Dakota State University (SDSU) is the state’s only land-grant institution, and it continues to lead in student enrollment among the state’s institutions of higher learning. Fulfilling its land-grant mission, SDSU advances agriculture and the biological sciences through campus-based research farms and laboratories, seven bio-diverse experiment stations, 14 interactive technology centers throughout the state, and extension specialists and educators in every county.

SDSU prides itself on its small classes and a supportive, caring faculty. According to Dr. Michael Adelaine, Vice President of Information Technology at SDSU, the university is well-known for its open and collaborative communications among faculty, staff, and students. However, the e-mail service that the university provided its students, hosted on an aging mainframe computer, was outdated and unpopular. “Our e-mail service was useful if you were a computer major and didn’t mind word prompts and an old-fashioned user interface,” says Adelaine. “Even though it was a free service, only 5 percent of the students actually used it.”

Adelaine, who oversees the Office of Information Technology at the university, began looking for an e-mail service for SDSU students that would support and encourage a collaborative learning environment. Adelaine looked for a hosted e-mail service so that the students’ e-mail would be compatible with the Microsoft® Exchange Server–based messaging solution used by the faculty and staff. A Web-based hosted solution would provide the students with an e-mail address they could take with them upon graduation. It would also reduce IT maintenance costs. IT employees were spending an average of eight hours a week handling issues with the mainframe e-mail service. For SDSU, this was an unwarranted drain on IT resources.

SDSU looked at other options, including third-party e-mail solutions for the mainframe, which would have cost approximately U.S.$150,000 to replace. While examining their options, Adelaine and the IT staff spent a lot of time talking with students to determine what their preferences would be for a new e-mail service.

“Students like free-flowing digital conversations. They don’t like to communicate in a structured way,” says Adelaine. “They told me clearly that they wanted their e-mail service to be easy to use and always available. They wanted the ability to forward mail and to receive mail from outside the university. They were all using different versions of public, Web-based e-mail services, so I knew I had the right idea about providing a similar service at SDSU that would suit their mobile lifestyle.”

When the Board of Regents, which represents the six state universities in South Dakota, mandated that each university deliver an e-mail service to students to be used for official campus communications, Adelaine knew he had to make a decision. “They left it up to each university to choose what system to deploy, so I took the opportunity to conduct a formal poll among the students to identify the Web-based e-mail service they liked the best,” recalls Adelaine. “The majority of students preferred Windows Live™ Hotmail®.”

Armed with a solid student endorsement, Adelaine put forward his proposal to the SDSU administration to work with Microsoft on a hosted, Web-based e-mail service. He says, “I explained that we’d save IT resources through integration with our Exchange Server environment and benefit from Microsoft experience hosting Hotmail, which students prefer and would likely adopt.”

Solution

At the same time that Adelaine was discussing university e-mail options with his colleagues at SDSU, Microsoft invited universities to participate in a beta test program for a set of free, hosted communication services designed specifically for university students and alumni. Adelaine was the first to sign on. It was May 2005. The program, called Microsoft Live@edu, offers the familiar user interface of the Windows Live Hotmail Web-based e-mail service, as well as other communication and collaboration services. These services include Windows Live Messenger for multistudent instant-messaging conversations and Windows Live Spaces for sharing documents.

Collaboration with Microsoft

Adelaine worked with the Microsoft team to set up the security-enhanced communica-tions link between SDSU and Microsoft so that they could start provisioning student accounts. “If you are running an Exchange Server environment, it’s a seamless process to integrate Live@edu,” says Adelaine. “Although there was a little work upfront to ensure that Microsoft could ‘talk’ to our server, we had no problems. To make sure the Hotmail spam filters wouldn’t catch our e-mail messages, we gave Microsoft a list of our university IP addresses to create a Safe Recipients List.”

The Office of Information Technology decided to standardize all student e-mail names to the student’s first initial and last name, with @jacks.sdstate.edu as the domain. SDSU reasoned that this would be an easily remembered format that would also establish a brand for the university. Students with common last names also had numbers incorporated into their addresses.

Microsoft originally sent back the provisioned accounts in batches of 100, but because 2,780 first-year students were expected for the fall 2005 semester, SDSU asked for the removal of this restriction. “Microsoft increased the number of addresses per batch load to an unlimited number,” says Adelaine. “This was just one example of how responsive the team was and how Microsoft is evolving the solution over time. Because we were the first to go through this process, it was a bit of a learning curve for everyone, and the Microsoft team was outstanding. We were up and running, with all student accounts provisioned, by July 2005, in time for student orientation.”

Driving Adoption

In August 2005, the incoming students visited the campus for an orientation session. After they signed up for classes, the Student Affairs office sent their names to the Office of Information Technology to create their Live@edu accounts. Then it mailed postcards to students with instructions on how to activate their account through a Web site set up for that purpose. The Office of Information Technology advertised the new e-mail service to returning students through the campus newspaper, flyers, posters, and information tables set up in the student union building. Returning students were also directed to the same Web site to go through the activation process.

“It was helpful to have the cooperation of the Student Affairs office,” says Adelaine. “They were just as interested as the Office of Information Technology in having the students adopt the e-mail service. They wanted to use it as a reliable communication vehicle for broadcasting important campus notices. It was important for IT staff to keep up a dialogue with the student association by attending their meetings and promoting the service. I also promoted the service to faculty and staff by talking to the deans on the Academic Council and to department heads and directors, and I gave a presentation to the faculty senate.”

During that first year, 30 percent of the student body activated and used their accounts, and 100 percent of the graduating students who had set up accounts took those accounts with them. By the fall of 2006, the Office of Information Technology had integrated the Live@edu e-mail activation into a new student portal called MyStateOnline. That year, 50 percent of enrolled students activated their accounts. Today that number is 90 percent of the student body.

Benefits

South Dakota State University students said they preferred Hotmail, and the university listened. SDSU delivered a familiar, Web-based e-mail service that fits the lifestyle of its students and matches their digital expectations for easy, flexible communications. “I’d been waiting for a Web-based university e-mail service. Live@edu met all my expectations,” says Adelaine. “Our students told us they preferred Hotmail. We deployed the hosted e-mail and communication services from Microsoft for students, and went from 5 percent using our old service to 90 percent using Live@edu.”

In the three years since SDSU has provided students with a simple-to-use, functional e-mail service, they have incorporated the solution into their daily lives on campus. They are more productive and organized. They also have a safe and reliable way to communicate with professors that fully reflects the university’s reputation for caring faculty and staff. At the same time, the Office of Information Technology is providing a far superior service to the students, at a significantly lower cost than that of alternative solutions running on a mainframe.

Increasing Productivity

Mike Utley, a third-year math student, first signed up for his Live@edu account when he arrived at SDSU as a first-year student. Before going to SDSU, he used the Hotmail service to keep in touch with friends, so he knew he’d like the e-mail service at school. Signing up for his Live@edu account was simple. “I just went to the Web site and walked through the steps. It was easy,” he says. “All my friends did the same. I look at this as my personal e-mail account for all my school activities. It helps me keep everything organized and separate from my personal life and it’s the best way to keep on top of my campus activities.”

Utley uses his Live@edu account to communicate with his professors as well as the staff members who work in the Office of Information Technology, where he is involved in a Student Technology Fellowship program. “The Office of Information Technology contacted me through my jacks.sdstate.edu account to arrange interview schedules and notify me of my acceptance into the work program, and my professors send all my mail through that account,” Utley says. “I no longer have to worry about not getting important notices or assignments because the service is so reliable. The spam filters work when they are supposed to; I’ve had no problem with junk mail. And nothing from the university gets blocked.”

Staying in Touch

With 5 gigabytes of storage space in his inbox, Utley has enough for his needs while at the university. “This is a great feature because I’m one of those people who like to keep everything, including my messages. You never know when you’ll need to go back and find something that someone sent you or look for a person you might want to reconnect with,” he says. “Live@edu has all the features I’m looking for. It’s easy to use, and it’s smooth and quick. I can check in to see my mail, and then get back to my homework. It also works great on my Mac. I also like that I know how to reach everyone on campus if I need to. I used to have an Excel® spreadsheet that I used to keep track of people’s e-mail addresses. But now, all I need to know is the person’s name and I have their address.”

For Utley, the Live@edu service is a great way to keep in touch with fellow students, faculty, and staff, a benefit he’s looking forward to after he graduates. “When I leave SDSU, I’ll have been using this address for four years. I’m definitely going to continue using it to stay in touch with people,” Utley says. “And it will look better when I’m communicating with potential employers and looking for work, because it provides instant recognition of my education at SDSU.”

Improving E-Mail Service at Less Cost

With the Live@edu program, the Office of Information Technology is able to provide a full suite of communication and collaboration services for students—for minimal costs and with virtually no on-site maintenance. Working with Microsoft also means that the university can expect more services to be added and that IT staff can take advantage of application programming interfaces to integrate new features into its student portal.

“One of the main reasons we signed on with Microsoft is that we wanted a supportive provider that had future plans for this technology,” says Adelaine. “I’m already looking forward to some of the new collaboration services that are coming out, like Office Live Workspace, which will provide password-protected spaces for storing and sharing Microsoft Office documents online. I know that some of our students are using Windows Live Spaces to coordinate study groups, and this will be a big help for online collaboration.”

And for the Office of Information Technology, all these services come with a minimal investment. Compared to replacing the mainframe and installing another in-house e-mail service, Live@edu represents a much better investment. “We would have had to spend $150,000 for a new mainframe and probably would have needed the equivalent of two full-time IT staff to support it,” confirms Adelaine. “Today, I’m managing the Exchange Server environment and Live@edu with half of a full-time equivalent. It was definitely the right decision to work with Microsoft. Two of our sister state universities are doing the same thing. I predict it’s only a matter of time before we are all using Live@edu.”

Microsoft Live@edu

The Microsoft Live@edu program provides institutions of higher education and K-12 with a set of free hosted and cobranded collaboration and communication services for students, alumni, and applicants. Offerings include a choice of Windows Live Hotmail or Microsoft Exchange Labs for e-mail, and Microsoft Office Live Workspace, an online space to collaborate on Microsoft Office documents.

For more information about Live@edu, go to:

get.

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“[With Live@edu] we’d save IT resources through integration with our Exchange Server environment and benefit from Microsoft experience hosting Hotmail, which students prefer and will likely adopt.”

Dr. Michael Adelaine, Vice President of Information Technology, South Dakota State University

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“Live@edu has all the features I’m looking for. It’s easy to use, and it’s smooth and quick. I can check in to see my mail, and then get back to my homework. It also works great on my Mac.” | |Mike Utley, Mathematics Major, South Dakota State University

| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

− Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 |Services

− Microsoft Live@edu

− Windows Live Hotmail | |

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published April 2008 | | |

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For more information about South Dakota State University, call (605) 688-4988 or visit the Web site at:

sdstate.edu

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