microsoft

I talked about Windows Live a while back and so news that 72 U.S. colleges will be using Windows Live for student email services seemed quite relevant. It makes sense financially for the colleges and from Microsoft's perspective it gets customers early before they have made a definite decision on who their email provider will be. No doubt Google and Yahoo will soon be following this same path with their mail services in an effort to build (Google) and maintain (Yahoo) their user-base.

The move is another vindication of the software as a service concept and will help bring some sanity to educational IT departments. Victoria University should adopt the same policy for student email and file storage. If not sponsored by Microsoft/Google/Yahoo they should at least scrap student email and file storage services in favour of Google/Microsoft/Yahoo email and personal USB keys. The savings whilst not huge would add up over time, plus I am in no doubt that the big players could provide a better level of service and featureset than what any over-stretched educational IT department could ever provide.

Today Microsoft released a Beta of Microsoft Office Live, a set of online tools targetted primarily at small businesses. With the product Microsoft appears to be aiming its big guns at SalesForce.com rather than Google's GMail, GTalk and rumoured calendar products. It is also a push to provide extra value within the Office lineup now that free software like OpenOffice are generating serious competition in their bread and butter, writing, counting and presenting marketspace. Microsoft Monitor has a good article about what Office Live is not which is probably more helpful than the stuff that comes out of Microsoft PR.

Regardless of how it is adopted worldwide it would appear to be a very good value proposition to New Zealand businesses. Currently vanilla hosting (web/email) are relatively expensive and for decent web/email/collaboration services it is easier (and often cheaper) to host things internally. If Microsoft can introduce these services within New Zealand at the same cost as advertised in the U.S. it should hopefully cause a shakeup within the local pricing structure. $50-$60 per month for email, web and basic collaboration services is extremely good value especially if Microsoft can integrate these online services with their desktop bretherin (which they will no doubt do). Another important concern for any business will be the backup/redundancy services offered. At this point it is unclear if this data can be easily backed up locally in a relatively open format (not encrypted Office Live only files).

Microsoft released this theme a while ago with Media Center but its only now come to my attention that they have released a native version for Windows XP. It is definitely a lot nicer than the default, jumbo sized button themes in Windows XP and less hassle to setup than WindowBlinds.

Download the Media Center (Royale) Theme for Windows XP