For three years, administrators at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland had been trying to outsource the student e-mail system but couldn’t find a way to do it cost effectively. They asked students to provide their MSN Hotmail addresses as an alternative, but students wanted addresses with the university’s domain name – caledonian.ac.uk – in order to be taken seriously when communicating with people outside the university.

Something had to be done. The university’s existing Web-based e-mail system was swamped and couldn’t handle the traffic generated by 15,000 students. The university was seeing 4,000 students enter each fall, rapidly increasing the load on the already overstressed system. A new state-of-the-art e-mail system – "kids are pretty discerning, if the product isn’t up-to-the-minute, they’re not interested," says Les Watson, the university’s Pro-Vice Chancellor – would be a significant expense. And Watson wasn’t that thrilled to be in the e-mail business to begin with, since he regarded it as the type of "commodity operation' that distracted the university from its core functions. "We had a problem," says Watson. “We took it to Microsoft and they solved it for us."

Glasgow Caledonian University may be special in many ways, but its deal with Microsoft isn’t one of them. Some 57 schools worldwide have either rolled out or have contracted to roll out their own branded and customized versions of this service from Microsoft and as many as 100 institutions are expected to do so by year end. All are participating in the Windows Live @ edu program, which provides institutions of higher education with flexible, robust and reliable hosted-communications services for students, alumni, and applicants. A minimal financial and infrastructure investment is made by the university to participate in the program, with Microsoft hosting the e-mail service while helping ensure the institutions maintain full control and management, including the ability to create, delete, and store e-mail addresses for their constituents.