Collaboration | News
Los Angeles Community College District Moves to Live@edu
Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) is providing all of its students, faculty, and staff with accounts for cloud communication and collaboration tools using Microsoft's Live@edu.
LACCD reported it chose to adopt Live@edu over other cloud services for a number of reasons, including the solution's security features, identity management, and integration with Microsoft Exchange.
"We needed a solution that would be easy to administer across all our colleges," said Jorge Mata, chief information officer for LACCD, in a prepared statement. One of the reasons we chose Microsoft Live@edu over Google Apps for Education is because it provides us with simple and automated management along with the visibility and control we need to apply our policies across our student information systems."
Each Live@edu account provides a 10 GB e-mail inbox, online calendar, 25 GB of additional file storage, document sharing, instant messaging, and video chat, all of which are accessible from any Internet-connected device.
To streamline the registration process for LACCD students and personnel, the Live@edu team worked with SADA Systems to automate the account registration process, so students will automatically receive their Live@edu account when they register at the college.
"Our unique partnership with Microsoft enables LACCD's IT personnel to focus on the system's more mission-critical IT goals," said Niv Dolgin, director of IT, SADA Systems, in a prepared statement. "Streamlining the registration process is not only a win for LACCD IT personnel; it is a win for students and LACCD administrative staff."
Live@edu accounts will also be unified across all nine LACCD colleges, so students and faculty who study or teach at multiple colleges will have a single account, simplifying inter-college communications and eliminating the need for students and faculty to juggle multiple e-mail accounts.
Los Angeles Community College District serves more than 250,000 students each year. It is the largest community college district in the United States, with nine colleges serving 36 cities in the greater Los Angeles area.
Further information about Microsoft Live@edu is available at the Live@edu site.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].
