MEEC – LIVE@EDU QUESTIONS
1. How does a campus integrate its current AD environment into live@edu?
Microsoft Live@edu is architected such that the university’s AD or LDAP directory (or any other
source directory, e.g. a SQL Server database) can easily act as the master data source for
directory information provided to Windows Live for account creation. The university can use
Remote Powershell or ILM to pass the minimal, non-personally identifiable attributes from the
AD or LDAP directory to Windows Live in order to create Windows Live credentials for users,
who can then utilize these credentials to authenticate to Windows Live Hotmail and other
Windows Live services. For more information please see:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchangelabshelp/cc713521.aspx.
2. How does a campus integrate its current Identity Management system
outside of AD into live@edu?
Currently, the only identity management system that has a management agent specifically for
ExchangeLabs is Microsoft’s Identify Lifecycle Manager (ILM) which schools can purchase to use
specifically with Live@edu for a onetime fee of $500. You can easily use ILM just as an middle
service that connects your Identity Management system to Live@edu.
Additional information can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/enus/exchangelabshelp/dd253224.aspx.
3. A user decides to change their name and wants their username changed,
how would this be done in live@edu?
For this scenario, we recommend using a proxy address (alias) instead of changing the users
back-end ID information. When you set up a proxy address, you can send emails to it, and when
you reply it will say that email is from that unique ID.
For example:
My unique ID may be Roxie12345@students.contoso.edu. I can keep this ID for life if the school
lets me. The administrator can also create a proxy address that is a little more user friendly, ex:
roxie.mitchell@students.contoso.edu. As a student I can give users my
roxie.mitchell@contoso.edu address instead of the less user friendly unique ID. When I respond
to emails, it will also come from roxie.mitchell@contoso.edu. When I graduate, instead of
moving my account to another domain or deleting my roxie.mitchell@sudents.contoso.edu
email address, you can just add another proxy address, ex: roxie.mitchell@alumni.contoso.edu.
Now I can receive emails at both addresses. If I get married and change my name, you can just
change my proxy addresses, ex: roxie.smith@alumni.contoso.edu. None of these proxy address
changes affect the unique ID (email account). You can find out more about proxy addresses by
going to: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchangelabshelp/cc967281.aspx.
If you do not use proxy addresses, then you will have to create a new account (with the new ID)
and migrate the users information to that account.
4. A user deletes his/her mail and wants to recover, is that possible?
Yes, deleted mail is stored in the deleted items folder for 15 days. Deleted mail is then
accessible via the recovery items folder for an additional 15 days. This means that a user can
retrieve deleted content for up to 30 days in total.
5. The campus wants to leverage a shared calendar amongst student groups,
is it possible to auto-populate students into a particular shared
calendar? Can we populate specific email lists with groups (say by
course, major, etc)
We do absolutely support dynamic distribution lists (to auto populate email lists with groups
based on attributes of the student – major, year, course, etc). You can find out more
information about dynamic distribution lists here: http://help.outlook.com/enus/140/dd302403.aspx. We have campuses who create a mailbox for a student group, i.e.
SGA@contoso.edu, and give multiple users access using the delegate functionality in Outlook
2007. Other students can then view the calendar that the SGA group manages, but opening a
shared calendar from the service.
6. How does spam and anti-virus
management work with email in Live@edu?
Outlook Live uses the Windows Live infrastructure to combat spam and phishing. For more
information, see Fighting Junk E-mail on the Windows Live Hotmail Postmaster Services Web site.
By default, all mailboxes that are created in Outlook Live have junk e-mail filtering enabled. For more
information, see Spam Filtering with Outlook Live.
For antivirus protection, Outlook Live relies on redundant signature-based virus scanning. All
inbound and outbound e-mail in Outlook Live is scanned for viruses.
7. Campuses have had issues with hotmail blacklisting sites and blocking
mail from that campus to hotmail users, is there any mechanism in this
to ensure that universities can "whitelist" certain domains to being
able to reach live@edu recipients?
Yes this capability is a core capability of our service and we safelist the university’s IP addresses
so that email sent from servers you specify are not blocked by spam filters. We also allow mail
sent from one student to another in the same domain to bypass filters as well.
8. A user forgets his password and changes this on our end, how quickly
does that propagate to live@edu?
This depends on how you set up password syncing from your environment to the Live@edu
environment. There are several ways to achieve this, and you can read about the scenarios here:
http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd253225.aspx.
9. A user has an existing hotmail account, can they keep their existing
hotmail account and live@edu account? Can they easily forward from one
to another?
If your users have Windows Live IDs that existed in your domain before you enrolled in Outlook
Live, you should import them so any settings that are associated with the Windows Live ID, such
as instant messaging contacts, are preserved and usable in your Outlook Live organization.
For example, suppose your organization had an on-premises e-mail solution for the domain
contoso.com, and you are moving the contoso.com domain to Outlook Live. It is likely that many
of your users created Windows Live IDs for their e-mail addresses in the contoso.com domain
and they will expect those Windows Live IDs to work in Outlook Live. You can find out more
information about this scenario here: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd219462.aspx
Forwarding is enabled by default, but schools have the ability to opt out of this functionality for
their managed accounts. Additional forwarding information has been provided in question #10.
10. A user has a third party email address they want to use, can they
easily forward their email from live@edu to that third party service (I
believe they can) or must the university handle the forwarding on our
mail server end?
Forwarding is a capability for Live@edu users, and IT Admins can decide to turn this feature on
or off by domain. Users are able to set up and manage forwarding themselves. You can view
extensive information about it here: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/cc825484.aspx.
Users can also set up Live@edu to download email from other accounts (instead of sending
Live@edu email to the third party account). You can find additional information here:
http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/cc511377.aspx.
11. How does instant messaging work within the live@edu accounts?
Instant messaging is enabled in R3 (the next service update for Exchange Labs), where users are
able to chat with other Live@edu and live users directly in the user interface of their email
window. By default, there are no contacts added to the chat list for the user, and they will have
to go and add the contacts in themselves. Presence is also integrated in to the environment, so
users can see indicators if their peers are online, busy, away, etc.
12. How is the Identity and Lifecycle Management product used, if at all,
in working with live@edu?
We have some customers using Live@edu and ILM in beta, but it is not widely available to all
customers yet. If you are interested in accessing the administrative documents for ILM, please
contact your Microsoft representative. Extensive information regarding ILM support with
Live@edu can be found here: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd219473.aspx.
13. How are affinity groups in Live@edu managed and maintained?
Affinity groups can be managed and maintained using the dynamic distribution group
management functionality (http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd302403.aspx).
14. How is MAP and POP supported ? Are all connections done over SSL?
Exchange Labs supports Exchange ActiveSync, POP/S, and IMAP4 to access and synchronize a
mailbox with a mobile phone.
All connections are encrypted and done over TSL (the next version of SSL).
15. Is a campus would move their faculty and staff to the hosted exchange
service, is there a way to integrate students in the free live@ecu and
faculty using the hosted exchange?
There are two hosted Exchange Services that a campus can move their faculty and staff to.
1) They can use the Live@edu service with Exchange Labs. This is offered for all faculty and
staff, students, and alumni at no cost.
2) They can use Exchange Online (http://www.microsoft.com/online/exchangeonline.mspx), which is offered at a per user per year fee.
Both services offer different levels of integration with the Live@edu environment.
16. Could a campus set up a faculty/staff user in the live@edu service to
be part of the shared calendaring but would like to keep email a part
of the on-campus service, can this be done?
Our calendar is tightly integrated in to the mailbox environment (as is tasks, contacts, etc). In
order for a user to have a calendar in this service, they will need to have a mailbox created. You
can set up forwarding on that mailbox though, to send any emails that were sent to that address
to be forwarded to the on premise mailbox that is the Faculty members primary email account.
You can also create a LiveID for a Faculty member so that they can take advantage of the
collaboration capabilities even if they do not use the email service (you can provision a LiveID
for a faculty member and not create a mailbox for that account). There is a great Microsoft blog
on this topic here: http://liveatedu.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!C76EAE4D4A509FBD!662.entry.