This Week in BPOS News 1/7/2011

This week in BPOS news is a recurring segment on the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog that covers news from all sectors of Cloud Computing and the Microsoft Online Services business suite known as the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). You can read all past This Week in BPOS News segments here. Happy New Year! We are back with not only the New Year, but two new BPOS stories. For this week in BPOS news we take a look at how the largest education institution in the world is increasing their productivity, and we view a chat with Microsoft’s CIO about how employees are testing the Cloud. 1. SUNY to get Microsoft’s Live@edu program SUNY stands for the State University of New York. SUNY universities across New York State feature the largest system of education institutions including universities, colleges and community colleges in the world. SUNY has 64 campuses that are a part of the Live@edu program and will allow more than 465,000 SUNY students to use Microsoft Online’s Live@edu productivity suite. In our first story, CNET discusses the new agreement between SUNY and Microsoft that brings more collaboration and productivity to students. Microsoft’s U.S. Education CTO, Cameron Evans, says that Live@edu will also help save SUNY colleges money. CNET reports that Monroe Community College, one of colleges in the SUNY system, will save $600,000 over five years. Students will also benefit from Microsoft Live@edu through new collaboration tools that will increase productivity campus wide. Is your school on Live@edu? Have you seen an increase in productivity? Leave your thoughts below. Related Stories: Kentucky Department of Education Chooses Microsoft’s Live@edu New York announces deal with Microsoft’s cloud 2. Microsoft CIO: We're dog-fooding the cloud Infoworld.com features a discussion with Microsoft CIO Tony Scott, as they converse about Microsoft’s cloud and how employees are beta testing, or as we call it, dog-fooding. This article is a transcript of an intriguing conversation that covers topics ranging from what it’s like being a CIO of Microsoft, to how the internal beta testing, or dog-fooding, of the cloud is conducted at Microsoft. There is also some great information from Tony Scott about Office 365 and how Microsoft is beginning the internal dog-food process. Tony also discusses other cloud initiatives at Microsoft like Windows and SQL Azure. The entire transcript is 5 pages and provides some great insights and information into the mind of Microsoft’s CIO. I would recommend this piece from Infoworld.com to anyone interested in the cloud or interesting in learning more about Microsoft’s CIO. What questions would you ask Microsoft’s CIO? Are you testing Microsoft’s Cloud? Leave any of your thoughts and comments below. What are your thoughts about the stories we shared with you this week? Did you see a story you want to share with us? Let us know what other topics you’d like to see. You can comment on this blog post or send an email to our community mailbox . Follow us on Twitter and like our Facebook page.

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This Week in BPOS News 1/7/2011