what is live@edu anyway?

So at first glance - it's a cloud based / hosted email system based on Microsoft Exchange 2010 - but that barely scratches the surface! under the hood it's much more than that, we've got Outlook Web Access, SharePoint, SkyDrive, Office Online, Instant Messaging and the ability for admins to customise a lot of what goes on under the hood
Let’s take a look:

Email - OWA / Full support for POP / IMAP/ MAPI / mobile clients - get this it also works on Windows Mobile, iPhone, iPad, Android and just about any other mobile device that supports these protocols

SkyDrive - this has evolved over that last few years from the previous Live Mesh product (that never officially made it out of beta) it offers 25GB of online storage (per user!!) and also a utility (LiveSync) to sync upto 5GB of this space to multiple machines for offline use. This works great for people on the move who want to take documents with them, edit them and then upload them back to the cloud for use in another location. You can also share folders in your SkyDrive with other users inside and outside of your Live@Edu tenancy

SharePoint - online collaboration may not sound too interesting or may be a new concept all together. For those of you familiar with SharePoint you will notice this is similar to SharePoint Foundation - the free edition of SP 2010. Its abilities are limited but I suspect will get better over time

Office Online - do you have users who don’t have office at home or on the move? Or maybe you have some IT labs / thin clients / cyber café’s where you don’t have the budget / hardware or ability to install full office? This may be the answer! Word, Excel and PowerPoint are part of the new Office 365 (formerly office online) they aren’t fully functional like the full client install’s but allow you to create and edit most documents. This, like SP is all 2010 versions and saves directly to your SkyDrive

Instant Messaging - at this point the IT manager rolls his eyes and tries to find a way to turn this off (it's possible by the way) but in post 16 education this may be useful (certainly from my experience in pre 16 education instant messaging usually means instant bullying). Or it could just be used for staff. Either way you can access it via the OWA interface or from full Live Messenger just the same as you would a Hotmail account

The Admin Side - this is what i will concentrate on in future posts, most of the management is done via Power Shell scripts (don't let this put you off) i am by far no script money but I’ve picked up a lot working with live@edu and realised it's far easier than it looks. A good place to start when looking for help with Power Shell commands for L@E is always the official help site (help.outlook.com) but always consider that as the email side of things is based on Exchange 2010 (although slightly lighter than the full version) it’s still Exchange at heat so often exchange commands will work