As The Productivity Suite Wars Heat Up, Microsoft’s Live@edu Adds More Partner Schools

The war to win over educational institutions for the cloud is getting heated. Productivity suite rivals Microsoft and Google are battling it out to see who can be the go-to provider for a cloud-based email platform for universities and colleges across the U.S. Google Apps, which currently has 8 million users , is slightly behind Microsoft's 11 million users of Live@edu. But the race is still a close one considering that individual deployments can include hundreds of thousands of users. Live@edu is a web-based productivity suite for students, staff, faculty and alumni, which includes E-mail and calendars with a 10GB inbox, 25 GB of additional file storage, document sharing, instant messaging, video chat, mobile e-mail, and Office Web Apps. Currently more than 10,000 schools in more than 130 countries have deployed Live@edu.