Live@Edu ~Deployment Procedure

Hello Friends, 

 Good to have you all back. I found many of them puzzled about Live@Edu Program by Microsoft. So here I give a clear picture of what it is and what are the procedures of deploying it in your campus. 

 

Live@Edu Criteria:

• Colleges should be offering graduate degree and/or post graduate degree courses e.g. B.Sc, BCA, BBA, B.Tech, B.E, M.Sc., MCA, MBA, M.Tech, M.E. etc.

• Currently Live@Edu is not applicable to high-schools having only 10+2 classes (I too don't know the reasons. )

• There should be more than 550 students in the college/department.
  

Live@Edu Deployment Prerequisites:

• You should be able to at least understand the terms like IP Address, Domain, URL, Control Panel, DNS Record, E-Mail Server, MX Records, Web Space etc.

• The college should have its own website. We require only the domain name (later during configuration), no web-space is required.

• If the college has no web site, or if the management is hesitating to provide you the access to the control panel or even worse, if the college already has an email solution for its students, you can still approach and try to convince the college management to buy a new domain name for the deployment of Live@Edu which would mere cost less than Rs. 500/-. This new domain should be approved by your college authority for its genuineness through  a valid letter (which you need to submit as proof).

• You should have access to the website control panel or at least to the college server/network administrator who has access to the website control panel.

Live@Edu Configuration Prerequisites:
After you are done with all these and ready to start, follow the steps below:
1. Log on to Windows Live Admin Centre
2. Sign-In with your Student Partners ID.
3. After you have logged in, click on the Add Domain button
4. Enter the domain name in the textbox provided e.g. mycollege.ac.in and choose Set up Windows Live Hotmail for my domain
5.  Then accept the agreement and proceed to the configuration settings page.
6.  You shall see something like this, this is just an example, your information may vary:

You need to prove ownership of this domain by creating an MX record or a CNAME record. Use the settings below.

Mail setup (required)

To set up mail and prove ownership of this domain, you must create an MX record through your domain registrar. Use the following settings:

• DNS record type: MX
• Host: mycollege.ac.in
• MX server: 609640938.pamx1.hotmail.com
• TTL: 3600 or 1 hour
• Priority: 10 (or High priority)

 7. Then, log on to to your college domain control panel, and create a new MX record according to the details. If you don't know what all these mean, dont panic, just relax, take a print out of this info and ask your server/network administrator to do this for you.
8. After you have completed Step 7, wait for 12-16 hours (or maybe 1 day), for the DNS server to reflect the recent changes.
9.  Then again logon to Windows Live Admin Centre and if everything is alright, you shall see some thing like this:

Your domains

Click on the name of the domain you want to manage. Click the Add domain button to sign up another domain.

Domain name	Accounts	Membership	Status
mycollege.ac.in	0	open	Active

 10. Voila, now everything is perfectly fine. Now check if the membership column of your domain is Open or Closed. We have to make it closed. So to do that, click on your domain mycollege.ac.in. On the left hand side vertical menu, click on Open Membership then click on Settings. And finally click on the button saying Turn open membership off
11. Then lets move on to Co-Branding of Live@Edu and your College. Click in the link saying Co-Branding then click on the link saying Sign-in Page. And then upload a logo of your college with the following specifications:

File type: JPG
Max. height (pixels): 225
Max. width (pixels): 130

There are other co-branding options available, take your own time to play with them and know what they have to offer.
12. Finally its the time to add accounts to the domain.  For this you can take up attendance sheets of all your college