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
