The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) has become the latest in a long line of Australian universities to announce plans to move to Live@edu, after announcing its webmail email system will be upgraded to provide improved online communications to its some 30,000 students.
The upgrade will not affect current email addresses' attached to the University, and will provide an increase in storage capacity to 10GB per student.
In an email to UTS students, it was revealed that other features of the upgrade include the option of having an email account available for life, as well as the capacity to send attachments as large as 20MB.
UTS’ director of information technology, Chris Cahill, said the move will result in UTS’ webmail server no longer being run in house.
“The current student webmail service is run in house by UTS and was developed on the Sun Java Enterprise System [JES] platform,” he said in an email. “The upgraded email service will be Microsoft’s Live@edu offering.”
The planned upgrades will take place next month with the initial upgrades commencing at the start of December and concluding on Christmas Eve.
The interface is set to have a new look and feel as well as the extra option for students to share their calendars with other students.
UTS is not the first University to change its webmail system, with the University of Adelaide last year announcing its 16,000 students would be making the switch to Gmail.
The upgrades come as UTS earlier this year deployed a new network monitoring solution, in order to provide an end-to-end view of the experience to its thousands of IT users.