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Higher education institutions are seeking new ways of enhancing the IT investments they have already made and new reasons to consolidate their systems to ensure maximum savings and efficiencies.

New cloud technologies enable convenient access to central applications and provide consolidation (and cost reduction) benefits. With hosted services and storage, for instance, customers are finding new savings. Schools are already seeing benefits with Microsoft Live@edu, a suite of messaging, mobile, and collaboration and productivity services that enables virtual campuses, where students and educators can benefit from the free flow of information and ideas within each learning community.

St. John’s University administrators have found that Live@edu is one solution that is helping to strengthen their business and empower their work. While they plan to provide a more cost-effective solution by fully utilizing the hosted Microsoft Exchange Server-based e-mail service for all students, they are also going to take advantage of the hosted collaboration and virtual file storage capabilities across all their campuses. This will enable them to keep faculty and students connected on the same collaboration platform, while solving their long-term needs for classroom collaboration pages and team project workspaces.

“The millennium student comes to St. John’s expecting the latest technologies and online experiences that they have grown up with,” said Gary Young, associate director of Academic Technology of St. John’s University. “Now with the Microsoft Exchange Labs solution, we get enterprise-level hosted e-mail and collaboration tools.”

University of Central Florida Chief Information Officer Joel L. Hartman agreed. “We launched Live@edu as our new student e-mail platform in August, and so far, more than 27,500 students have signed up for the service — thousands per day at times. Early feedback suggests that our students are delighted with the Live@edu features, especially Skydrive and Office Live Workspace,” he said. “Live@edu provides our students not only a robust and easy-to-use e-mail platform, but also an increasingly powerful range of tools and services they can use to support their academic work and social activities.”