SharePoint added to Microsoft Live@edu!

Great new addition to Microsoft's Live@edu offering for students, from the Education Insights blog:

We are also announcing new SharePoint Online-based collaboration and productivity services will be available for students as part of the Live@edu next year. These new SharePoint-based services will offer IT departments more flexibility and control to set up and manage their school’s collaboration and productivity tools in a security-enhanced environment…as well as the ability to access and manage permissions to sites, documents and content (pictures, videos) with enterprise-class control.

For students, these new services give them access to similar types of functionality that has made SharePoint the fastest growing server product in Microsoft history. It will enable them to create, edit and securely access content from their school’s site anywhere, whether at home, at the school library or even while on the road for holiday. It will allow them to organize, track and easily share classroom information, interests, expertise and easily find colleagues. By leveraging Office Web Apps that are currently in technical preview, students will have a new online space where they can securely upload, easily share, and collaborate on documents, including in-place editing. We believe this will better prepare them for the workforce through use of functionality and technology used every day in the workplace.

Microsoft’s software plus services model—which spans mission-critical datacenter availability and security, Live@edu, Microsoft Online Services collaboration and communication offerings, and Windows Azure—combines the reach and flexibility of the cloud with the power of on-premises software applications. Today, we see that people want to access information on the PC, in the browser and on a mobile device…and I think this the real value in moving to the cloud…having the flexibility and choice to run your solutions either in the cloud, on premises, or a mix of the two.

For more information on getting started with Live@edu, please click here or call 866-997-0000, option 3.

Google Launches Sites for Google Apps! R.I.P. SharePoint?

As predicated back on February 6th, Google Sites (Wiki / JotSpot resurrection) is now part of Google Apps! This makes Google Apps an even more powerful and valuable set of tools. Now anyone can build dynamic websites and collaborate on them in real-time! This really makes Google Apps a "Sharepoint" killer. The amount of licensing fees, infrastructure requirements, hosting fees, just overall management and administration it requires to run SharePoint is overwhelming - even for an IT company like SADA. So this is definitely going to be one of those tools we use!

Official announcement below:
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http://sites.google.com/

Google Apps that makes creating a team web site as easy as editing a document. With Google Sites, people can quickly gather a variety of information in one place -- including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and text -- and easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, their entire organization, or the world.

Google Sites is the new version of JotSpot, which was acquired by Google in late 2006. As a former JotSpotter, it's particularly gratifying to see our wiki-based collaboration product surface on Google.com.

Some key product features from http://sites.google.com/overview.html :

- Customize your site's interface to resemble your group or project's look and feel

- Create a new sub-page with the click of a button and edit the page with a WYSIWYG editor

- Choose from a growing list of page types: webpage, announcements, file cabinet, dashboard and list

- Centralize shared information: Embed rich content (video, Google Docs documents, spreadsheets, presentations, Picasa photo slide shows, iGoogle gadgets) into any page, and upload file attachments

- Manage permissions settings to keep your site as privately or widely editable and viewable as you'd like

- Search across your Google Sites content with Google search technology

See also the Sites Help Center page: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/topic.py?topic=14075