Saturday, 30 April 2011

Cloud Services for Universities & Colleges

Many Universities and Colleges are moving to the Cloud Services to save costs and provide more facilities for the students.

Curtin University, Perth Australia moves more services to the Cloud with Windows Azure.
Copenhagen Business School moves to the Cloud. They recently switched their student email to the Cloud, using Live@edu.

DFEEST (Department of Further Education Employment Science and Technology) wanted to build a new messaging platform for their 85,000 staff and students, either using their existing Novell Groupwise solution, or using an external email service. They evaluated Google & Microsoft and chose Microsoft's Live@edu. The big benefit for DFEEST is that they're saving money, at the same time as delivering a better services to their users.

The Business School at Brno University of Technology, in the Czech Republic, is one of the universities moving to Cloud services, to enable 4,000 students to connect to their learning whilst they are away from campus. They're using the Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services) system to connect e-learning to their students in employment, and in other countries including the UK and the US. What they've found is that it gives their students more opportunities for learning, at the same time as helping them deliver a more flexible service within their limited IT budget. And a significant result for them is that they are able to do this with no more staff resources - leaving them to focus on the quality of teaching and learning.

The School of International Relations at the Economics University in Prague is another of the universities moving to Cloud services, as they have moved students studying IT management to the BPOS Cloud services.

By choosing to move to the Cloud, all these universities have claimed to have speeded up their deployment, which in turns speeds up access to educational resources for their students. They've also reduced their cost of ownership, by not having to rely on the existing university infrastructure.

Universities and Colleges are becoming a big business hub for Cloud Service Providers and the competition in this segment is heating up very rapidly!

References: Microsoft Case Studies on www.Microsoft.com
Also published on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more

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