Dec 21, 2010 14:35 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has inked a new major deal which will see almost half a million users transition to its Cloud offerings for organizations in the education sector.

The Redmond company revealed that the State University of New York (SUNY) will offer 465,000 of its students the possibility to leverage the Live@edu suite of online communications and collaboration solutions.

Live@edu will be offered on SUNY’s 64 campuses across the state of NY, allowing the new users to take advantage of hosted e-mail and calendars.

Microsoft underlined that students will also benefit from online storage, as well as additional functionality such as instant messaging and videoconferencing.

And last but not least, Live@edu also means that students will be able to kick up a notch their document sharing and collaboration through Office Web Apps, the Cloud component of Office 2010.

“SUNY is joining a growing class of higher education institutions that is committed to career readiness and making sure its students are able to enter the work force and hit the ground running,” revealed Sig Behrens, general manager for U.S. Education at Microsoft.

“By using Live@edu to communicate with their friends and professors, submit homework, write reports, prepare presentations, and share online documents for class projects, students are gaining experience and software skills employers are looking for.”

There are already in excess of 70,000 SUNY students already using Live@edu, and the Redmond company certainly expects more to crowd to its Cloud.

While financial details or benefits of the agreement weren’t made public, the software giant did emphasize that cost savings are inherent to the migration to its Cloud.

Microsoft did provide an example, designed to help organizations get an idea of how much money they stand to save.

“Monroe Community College (MCC), one of the largest colleges in the SUNY system, was one of the first to rollout Live@edu to students three years ago,” the company said.

“Today, MCC continues to offer Live@edu to its 19,000 students as its official means of college communications and a key component of classroom management. Its previous on-premises e-mail solution could not keep pace with the innovative features offered by Microsoft as part of the Live@edu suite.

“By using Live@edu, the college is projecting a savings of $600,000 over the next five years while providing more technology services to students than ever before.”