14 DAY TRIAL // On Monday, Microsoft announced that the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) chose to roll out Microsoft Live@edu to provide its students, faculty and alumni with a communication service accessible anytime, anywhere.
Through this deployment, LACCD will be able to offer all those in its campus easy-to-use cloud communication and collaboration tools, while registering administrative and IT staff time savings.
LACCD notes that they evaluated both Live@edu and Google Apps for Education, and that they decided to adopt the former due to its technology’s security features and identity management capabilities. It also offers seamless integration with LACCD’s on premise Exchange solution.
LACCD serves over 250,000 students annually at nine colleges in 36 cities in the greater Los Angeles area and is the largest community college district in the country. There are accounts for over 2.5 million student records.
“Live@edu aligns with LACCD’s strategic vision to modernize and improve our colleges to ensure Los Angeles residents are trained with the skills needed to fill jobs of the 21st century,” said Jorge Mata, chief information officer for LACCD.
“We needed a solution that would be easy to administer across all our colleges. 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.”
To deploy the needed solution, Live@edu partnered with SADA Systems, thus being capable of tailoring the service to support manual student email registration and reducing time and costs involved in the registration process. As soon as a student registers, an email and the collaboration account are delivered in real time.
“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. “Streamlining the registration process is not only a win for LACCD IT personnel; it is a win for students and LACCD administrative staff.”
Through Live@edu, LACCD will be able to offer its students a single email address to use even at times when they have enrolled at multiple colleges. This applies to faculty who teach at multiple colleges as well, so that communication is greatly simplified.
Following the deployment of Live@edu, LACCD also expects to eliminate paper processes, including the printing of fee receipts, which can now be delivered via email.
“We are excited to see the largest community college district in the U.S. deploy Live@edu to not only experience the benefits of a cloud-based collaboration service, but to also roll out a technology that will develop its students’ skills,” said Sig Behrens, general manager of U.S. Education for Microsoft.
“LACCD is committed to student employability and recognizes the value to its students of skills gained by using Microsoft technology and that the knowledge will serve them well as they prepare to enter the workforce.”