Customer Solution Case Study
/ College Consortium Saves $36,000 Annually with Hosted Communication Services
“With Live@edu and our hosted Identity Lifecycle Manager solution, we have achieved a paradigm shift in our ability to provide business-class communication and collaboration services for our students.”
Bill Gray, Chief Information Officer, Technical College System of Georgia
The Technical College System of Georgia wanted to provide a standard student e-mail service to member colleges. It encouraged colleges to use Microsoft® Live@edu—a suite of hosted collaboration services—and hosted Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 to facilitate the integration between Live@edu and the SunGard Higher Education Banner student information system. Now colleges can provide reliable campus communications for students at no cost.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published September 2009
Business Needs
With a goal of preparing students for the work force, the Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG) is responsible for the state’s technical colleges, adult literacy programs, and a host of economic and work-force development programs. Through its technical education, adult education, and customized business and industry training, TCSG offers lifelong education for all adult Georgians.
TCSG provides and supports a standard IT infrastructure for member colleges. This policy simplifies centralized IT services and reduces costs. All colleges use the SunGard Higher Education Banner student information system andthe Microsoft® Exchange Server messaging solution for faculty and staff. Yet, when it came to e-mail service forthe system’s 156,000 full-time and part-time students, there was no standard. “We negotiated a deal with Everyone.net, but only 12 colleges took advantage of that solution because ithad only basic functionality and required administration at each college,” says Bill Gray, Chief Information Officer at TCSG. “It also cost 72 cents per student, per year.”
Some colleges allowed the students to use their own Web-based e-mail. “We never knew if students received e-mail sent to them from college administration or faculty,” says Jason Williams, Executive IT Director at Savannah Technical College, one of the TCSG member colleges. “Any e-mail solution would have to integrate with the Banner system to simplify student identity management, so I looked at deploying the e-mail solution from SunGard. The cost would have been six figures, and we are facing budget cuts. Ineeded an inexpensive solution that wouldn’t take up too much of my staff’stime.”
Then TCSG member college Valdosta Tech deployed Microsoft Live@edu with Microsoft Office Outlook® Live and integrated the hosted e-mail solution with the Banner system using Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007. TCSG realized that it had found an e-mail service it could offer as the standard for the rest of the colleges in the consortium.
Solution
Microsoft Live@edu is a hosted communication and collaboration solution designed for educational institutions. Using this service, TCSG students and alumni receive an Office Outlook Live Web mail account, with calendaring. Other Live@edu services include Windows Live™ SkyDrive™ storage technology, which provides 25 gigabytes of online storage in a highly secure environment; Windows Live Spaces for creating personal spaces and writing blogs; and Microsoft Office Live Workspace for sharing Microsoft Office documents.
“We deployed Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 at the central office and made it available to member colleges as a hosted service,” says Darrell Carter, Network Administrator at TCSG. “Now a college can sign up for Live@edu communication and collaboration services and take advantage of Banner integration without maintaining their own instance of Identity Lifecycle Manager. They simply set up their domain and send me their logon for the account so I can configure everything on the Identity Lifecycle Manager side. Then they send me all the student information from Banner through a secure FTP site. Identity Lifecycle Manager processes that information to create an e-mail address and logon for each student.”
Processing the first batch of files from a college can take six hours, but after that an automated script runs twice a day to update each college’s student list. Updating all colleges’ files takes the system about 30 minutes. Since the solution became available in April 2009, six member colleges have joined the shared system.
Benefits
TCSG is the first educational consortium in the United States to create a hosted model of delivering Live@edu e-mail and collaboration services to member colleges. What’s more, the solution also satisfies its members’ main criteria: integration with Banner, low cost, and ease of maintenance. Now a group of 28 colleges can take advantage of Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 to integrate Live@edu into their Banner systems with little effort and no cost.
“With Live@edu and our hosted Identity Lifecycle Manager solution, we have achieved a paradigm shift in our ability to provide business-class communication and collaboration services for students,” says Gray.
Reduced Costs
The hosted model means that the central IT office can provide and support a standard communication and collaboration solution for member colleges at reduced overall costs for the consortium. After it retires its Everyone.net email service, TCSG will save U.S.$36,000 a year. And instead of spending a six-figure sum on communication and collaboration services for its students, Savannah Technical College will be deploying Microsoft Live@edu to its 5,300 students by October 2009, free of charge.
Simplified E-Mail Administration
Live@edu integration with Banner simplifies the administration of student identities and e-mail accounts. “It took virtually no time to get started. I sent the Banner-generated file of student email addresses to the main office to create the student accounts in our Live@edu domain,” says Williams. “After that, it’s virtually maintenance-free. Now our four-member IT department can focus on other projects.”
Enhanced College Student Services
Ultimately, it’s the students who will benefit the most from the unique shared solution that TCSG has deployed. “Some of our colleges didn’t even offer e-mail services,” says Gray. “Now they have a suite of sophisticated collaboration services that will go a long way to support our mandate for preparing students for the working world.”
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published September 2009