All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and Microsoft Corporation announced that AICTE is deploying Microsoft Live@edu as one solution amongst many such initiatives with IT majors and Industries, over the next three months to more than 10,000 technical colleges and institutes throughout India. The Cloud deployment will expand students’ access to high-quality technical education and collaboration.
In one such initiative being implemented, Live@edu is a hosted communication and collaboration service that offers email, Microsoft Office Web Apps, instant messaging and storage to AICTE’s more than 7 million students and nearly 500,000 faculty members, for a total reach of 7.5 million users — roughly double the size of the Los Angeles population — making AICTE Microsoft’s largest cloud customer ever. Live@edu is the first step in AICTE’s deployment of Microsoft Cloud computing for education. AICTE also plans to deploy Microsoft Office 365 for education when it becomes available later this year, providing access to Microsoft Exchange Online email and calendar, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Lync Online and Microsoft Office Professional as the technical infrastructure to support member colleges and institutes.
“Microsoft’s Cloud platform will make for a progressive ecosystem and contribute to the country’s technical education by providing a better communication and collaboration platform for institutes and students,” said Dr. S. S. Mantha, Chairman of AICTE.
To carry out its charge of evaluating the curriculum and quality of education for all technical institutes across the country, AICTE needed to have consistent and timely communication with the colleges, some of which are located in the remotest districts of India. AICTE and the ministry wanted to deploy a technology system that would provide an efficient platform for students and the institutional framework and would foster efficiency and support broader educational reforms. The council opted for Microsoft Live@edu because of Microsoft’s extensive experience in higher education and ability to deploy a system across geographically distributed locations without adding significantly to the institutions’ IT management costs or complexity.
The implementation is already underway and is being managed by Microsoft and a set of Live@edu partners. Full deployment is expected to be complete by summer 2012. Live@edu is the Coud suite for education, with more than 22 million people using the service worldwide. At 7.5 million users, the AICTE deployment is the largest Cloud deployment ever.