shahine.com/omar/

From Ars Technica on Gmail for domains in beta:

“This is probably about as close to an ideal turn-key solution for e-mail as you can get. Colleges, small-to-medium sized businesses, non-profits, and others should see this as a stellar opportunity to essentially "outsource" their e-mail—and all that comes with it (downtime, spam management, etc.)—to Google. How many organizations can offer 2GB of e-mail space and a user interface as refined as Gmail? Not many. How many can do it for free? Practically none.”

AHEM!!!! domains.live.com (in beta) offers FREE outsourced email for your own domain. Coupled with Windows Live Mail (in beta) you get 2GB of e-mail space AND a user interface as refined as Gmail as well as the opportunity to upgrade to Premium services so you can use Outlook to store your E-mail, tasks, notes and contacts on our servers. You can also use spaces, Messenger and any other Windows Live service customized how you want using your domain account as a passport sign-in.

“As an aside, it is worth noting that Microsoft's solution isn't truly free, no matter what you choose. The educational version, at least, requires Microsoft Identity Integration Server, which is sold separately.”

What University CTO in their right mind would hand over Directory Services to Google or Microsoft? Remember Hailstorm? Yeah I thought so. It’s fantastic that we allow universities to maintain whatever directory solution they want (LDAP, or Active Directory) and then give them tools to manage the user accounts themselves (we do not mange the domains or the accounts). This is a very powerful and flexible system and was built to scale to hundreds of universities in dozens of different countries.

I helped play a small part in the Windows Live @ edu Program by getting our provisioning system set up at Hotmail, but I’ve seen the work that a small handful of people created on and it’s world class. Expect to hear more about the University Program in the future, but for now check out this video.

Dare, Reeves and Scoble have posts that characterize this news as “been there done that”.

Update: I would like to note that I’m not particularly unhappy with Ars Technica as they did a better job reporting the facts than all the other reports on the topic that I’ve read. They do however omit enough details about what we’ve been doing that it does not paint the entire picture.