A few months ago Microsoft revealed a pricing model for BPOS that allowed NFP (not for profit) institutions such as charities and schools get access to the BPOS suite – without having to pay full price.
This was fantastic for those of us who sell it, as those organisations who purchased discounted Microsoft software often found it was significantly cheaper to continue with their on-premise solutions vs moving to the cloud.
The exception to this is Live@Edu which is free for academic institutions. It is effectively the Hotmail service but with a lot of deployment, branding, identity management, and reporting functionality built in. (It also runs on Exchange 2010 and integrates presence into Outlook.com!)
So with the NFP pricing released for BPOS academic institutions were finally able to use the ‘corporate’ suite of products for faculty & administration, and have the student body utilise the Live@Edu service (or however you want to mix it up).
However with the announcement that Live@Edu will be blended into Office 365 – this made it a little confusing because Live@Edu = free whereas BPOS / Office 365 = paid (albeit discounted).
So some clarification around the differences between the paid vs the free? Well unfortunately there won’t be any official information available until February 2011. However at this point it is expected that Office 365 for Education will include:
– Exchange Online 2010 = free
– SharePoint Online 2010 (MySites) = free
– Existing Live@Edu functionality (ie. SkyDrive, Messenger, Photos, etc.) = free
– Lync Online 2010 = paid (maybe, or replace Messenger)
– Archiving = paid
– Office subscription = paid
So, hard to say for sure at this point. However this does answer the simple question of whether schools will need to start to pay for their Live@Edu service when it rolls into Office 365: no.
They will continue to get the free ‘core’ set of products/solutions, and can pay for optional extras.
Discover more from Loryan Strant, Microsoft 365 MVP
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Loran,
Where did you get this information on what will be included at what price in Office365 for Education? I’ve yet to see a Microsoft document or post that outlines this. All anyone will say is that we will have in Office365 for Education what we have today in Live@edu and that pricing will not come until February. It’s great to see you say that Sharepoint is included for free as the Live@edu team announced back in 2009 (if my memory serves me correctly) that we would be getting it. They said it would be coming in 2010 but that was before the Office365 plans.
-Jared
I guess the Live@edu team wasn’t able to completely keep their past promise of providing SharePoint for free for Live@edu users. You can get SharePoint 2010 “for free” for students only when you pay for staff. http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20028156-75.html I knew it sounded too good to be true!