Customer Solution Case Study
/ University Builds Online, On-Campus Communities with Hosted Services
“Kaplan students use Microsoft Office. Google would complicate their lives, and because we are a for-profit university, it wasn’t free. With Live@edu, we saved hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.”
Ron Lockhart, Vice President, Academic and Application Support, Kaplan Higher Education
Kaplan Higher Education needed to replace its hosted email service for students, this time with a solution that offered more collaborative functionality and was accessible on its student portals. Kaplan provisioned 320,000 Microsoft Live@edu student email accounts and is using the suite’s programmatic interface to add new features to the portals, such as instant messaging and online workspaces, to enrich learning and drive student satisfaction.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published June 2010
Business Needs
Kaplan Higher Education, which includes Kaplan University, is a subsidiary of Kaplan, Inc., based in New York City. Offering campus-based and online certificate and degree programs, Kaplan is one of the largest for-profit postsecondary institutions in the United States.
Kaplan Higher Education focuses on helping adult or “nontraditional” students achieve their professional goals. It offers personal support that enables students to connect with peers, faculty, and advisers through a highly collaborative environment. Reliable email is a critical part of this community. The university had been providing students with a hosted email solution from Yahoo! called Zimbra Collaboration Suite since April 2009. However, although Kaplan was happy with the email service, Zimbra offered only minimal document-sharing functionality, which limited the university’s options for adding collaborative features on its web portals for students.
“Our first priority was email, but we wanted to gradually offer additional functionality for online community building and collaboration among students and faculty,” says Ron Lockhart, Vice President, Academic and Application Support at Kaplan Higher Education.
Then, in October 2009, Kaplan learned that VMware was acquiring Zimbra. Because of the uncertainty of Zimbra’s future with VMware, Kaplan decided to find a new partner for hosted email and collaboration services for its students. “By December 2009, we were evaluating our options,” says Lockhart. “But with Christmas holidays approaching, we faced the challenge of making a decision and migrating more than 125,000 students to a new service. We needed to get it right this time and find a supportive, long-term partner.”
Solution
Kaplan Higher Education invited Google and Microsoft to demo their hosted email and collaboration services. After a presentation that impressed Kaplan management, the university chose Microsoft Live@edu. Live@edu uses Microsoft Outlook Live to give studentsa web-based email account. Other Live@edu services include Windows Live SkyDrive storage technology and Windows Live Spacesfor the online storage, access, and sharing of documents.
“We didn’t expect to see the sophistication that was in Live@edu,” Lockhart recalls. “It’s essentially a hosted version of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, so it offers many benefits, such as the ability to work with mobile phones, a high priority for our students. Kaplan students use Microsoft Office. Google would complicate their lives, and because we are a for-profit university, it wasn’t free. With Live@edu, we saved hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.”
The interoperability between the hosted Live@edu services and the university’s on-premises Microsoft technologies, plus the solution’s rich APIs such as the Windows PowerShell tooland Microsoft Exchange Web Services Managed API, will reduce development costs for new student/faculty collaboration services. For example, Kaplan is addinginstant messaging capabilities tothe student portals to deliver safety-enhanced, managed communications with faculty members, who already use the instant messaging feature in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.
Kaplan worked closely with Microsoft to provision 320,000 Live@edu accounts by the end of February 2010—125,000 active student accounts and 195,000 alumni accounts. Given the timeframe, the university migrated the accounts without any existing data but provided an option to import old email messages by clicking a link on the student portals. To minimize disruption in email service, Kaplan let students keep their aliases and passwords and provides access to the service through the student portals using single sign on.
“After migrating 320,000 accounts, we had only 105 calls to the help desk,” says Lockhart. “Microsoft helped us by giving us lots of training materials for the students, and its technical resources were terrific. We have a sophisticated programming group here, and using the tried and tested Microsoft migration process, they were able to make even a project of this scale go smoothly.”
Benefits
Kaplan Higher Education has been runningLive@edu for just two months.With 100,000 active student accounts, Kaplan has one of the largest active Live@edu deploymentsin the United States.
Today, Kaplan has an extensible platform for meeting students’communication and collaboration needs. With Live@edu, Kaplan can provide services that faculty and students have been asking for, boosting its reputation as a responsive, caring learning environment—a big benefit for any educational institution.
“Students have been asking for a Microsoft Outlook–based email solution for years,” says Lockhart. “It’s not surprising they’ve been vocal about how much they like this Exchange-based email system. Its familiar user interface is virtually indistinguishable from Outlook.”
Because Kaplan developers are already familiar with the Live@edu APIs, the university can save money on building sophisticated collaboration and communication features into the student portals to enrich the Kaplan learning experience.Developers are augmenting the student portals programmatically—for example, by providing a mail preview function that alerts students that they have unopened mail when they log on. Kaplan is also using the APIs to maintain control of the student learning experience in line with university policies. “Delivering a Microsoft-based chat client for students that works seamlessly with our in-house solution makes it easy to add new portal functionality that doesn’t force us to deal with a cultural change,” says Lockhart.
Faculty members use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 internally, and they have been asking for a long time for the ability to set up SharePoint sites as online collaborative environments for their classes. “Now, with SharePoint Online slated to be integrated into Live@edu, we can make that happen,” says Lockhart. “The fact that Microsoft is continually developing Live@edu means that we finally have a strategic partner to grow with us.”
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published June 2010