Edith Cowan adopts Live@edu email

Edith Cowan University (ECU) is the latest institution to announce its move to Microsoft's Live@edu hosted email.

Following the likes of Sydney University, Australian Catholic University and the University of Queensland, ECU is set to move 36,000 student email accounts to the Microsoft service by the start of the 2010 academic year, according to a statement issued by Microsoft this morning.

The move will increase storage space from 50MB to 10GB and provide students with email addresses that won't expire after graduation.

However, while the adoption rate of Live@edu is high among learning institutions in Australia, there is some debate about its popularity among students.

Following Sydney Uni's transition to Live@edu, some students published fliers opposing the move alleging: "While ICT claimed in late May that there had been 'only 11 complaints', a survey conducted by the Faculty of Medicine found 69 per cent net dissatisfaction vs. 17 per cent net satisfaction amongst their students with the transition to the new email system".

The flier, and other sources of student protest suggest IT staff contested the transition, flagging potential problems, including "the disruptive timing of the launch, or the difficulties that would be caused for some students by current addresses failing to work after the end of 2009". The project team is said to have ignored these oppositions.

However, other universities including ACU have argued that Microsoft was the clear winner in trials including other email solutions. Edith Cowan University is the 13th tertiary institution in Australia to adopt Live@edu, according to Microsoft.

The main alternative to Live@edu so far has been Google's hosted Gmail service, which a number of universities and other institutions in Australia have adopted.