Biggest US cloud deployment kills Google Apps for Education | ZDNet

Biggest US cloud deployment kills Google Apps for Education | ZDNet

Biggest US cloud deployment kills Google Apps for Education

By Zack Whittaker | June 4, 2010, 7:57am PDT

Summary

The state of Kentucky has rolled out Microsoft's Live@edu service across 700,000 staff and students in a single weekend, the quickest and largest cloud deployment in US history.

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Education, Google Inc.,Google Apps, Microsoft Corp., Cloud Computing, Zack Whittaker

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In what is expected to be the largest cloud deployment in the United States, Microsoft’s Live@edu service has been rolled out to over 700,000 students and staff in Kentucky, the state education department for education has confirmed via Microsoft.

This is the pinnacle point in a series of high profile anti-Google Apps moves which could be a turning point in the company’s offering of their Live@edu competing service.

The migration from their old Exchange 2003 on-site service to cloud-accessed Exchange 2010 has also been one of the quickest deployments ever seen, with over half a million accounts being migrated over in a single weekend. There is no doubt that the deployment was assisted by existing Microsoft technologies which would have made the transition smoother.

Live@edu now reaches over 11 million people worldwide in 10,000 schools, across 130 countries.

Google anounced recently that their instant-communication Twitter-like tool Wave was rolled out to Google Apps for Education users, as well as a highly anticipated migration tool to assist switching from Outlook to Gmail. However this does not seem to have had any immediate impact