The choice looks relatively straightforward: spend money on maintaining and upgrading email systems for college students, or participate in a Google or Microsoft program that provides student email and other web-based applications for free.

For habitually cash-strapped colleges, selecting Windows Live @ Edu or Google Apps Education Edition makes sense. Andy Guess at Inside Higher Ed suggested such outsourcing will become the standard at most institutions over the next few years.

Both Google and Microsoft have been rapidly gaining converts, as Guess noted:

Jeff Keltner, Google’s enterprise specialist for collaboration products, said institutions at six of the seven continents use its education services, with several hundred thousand active users logging in at a regular basis from several thousand campuses around the world.

The senior product manager for Microsoft’s Live @ edu program, Bruce Gabrielle, said the company has some 450 higher education clients, which ballooned from 300 since the end of June. “A lot of awareness is spreading virally,” he said.

Microsoft and Google have similar aims in mind: build brand loyalty with students and hope they can keep it once he or she graduates. Today’s Gmail or Live @ Edu user could be tomorrow’s regular viewer of advertising on the company’s other properties. Or even a corporate decision-maker opting to spend money with the two Internet rivals.

Guess also cited the trend toward other web-based applications for higher education, where software as a service has made inroads where shrinkwrapped or home-brewed applications once dominated the landscape.

Campus IT staff may not like the outsourcing trend, but the cash savings will be significant enough that more campuses will consider it. Universities have generous Internet connections and a student body that expects more than a basic email account during their attendance.

The schools look like they are willing to let Google or Microsoft fulfill those expectations.

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Windows Live Community Builder also offers company specific domain support while enabling the ability to register a domain name via supported partners included in registration.

With Windows Live Community Builder, businesses or non for profit organisations or anyone looking at creating a community service can now achieve deeper and more engaging connections with their community through customised, branded online experiences. Whether they want branded, familiar email services for their community or a member’s only area on their web site, complete with calendaring, contacts, and mapping features; Windows Live Community Builder has what they, their administrators, and their technology partners need. It’s easy to get started and painless to maintain – and it includes the peace of mind that comes from the technology, experience, and market leadership they’d expect from Microsoft.

Because this was a soft launch, there aren’t a lot of details about the service just yet, but it appears that at least the base version is free.Given that Google Apps is easy to use, has an established user base, and also offers free standard and education editions, I’m not sure the Windows Live Community Builder will pull too many folks away. What do you think?

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Some of the features include:

• E-mail on your own domain.
• Admin tools to help you add and manage member accounts.
• Create and share a photo album in minutes.

Not many people knew of it or even heard about it besides Australian Harvey Sanchez who made the first announcement.

"With Windows Live Community Builder, businesses or non for profit organizations or anyone looking at creating a community service can now achieve deeper and more engaging connections with their community through customized, branded online experiences. Whether they want branded, familiar email services for their community or a member’s only area on their web site, complete with calendaring, contacts, and mapping features; Windows Live Community Builder has what they, their administrators, and their technology partners need. It’s easy to get started and painless to maintain – and it includes the peace of mind that comes from the technology, experience, and market leadership they’d expect from Microsoft."

Its very simple. All you need to do is sign up (javascript:shiftOpacity(‘getStarted’, 500)) and reap in the benefits.

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Just head to translator.live.com/AddIn.aspx, select the language your website uses, and it’ll give you the code. If your site is in English, this will be the code:

< script type="text/javascript" src="http://translator.live.com/TranslatePageLink.aspx?pl=en" >< /script >

Just dump that anywhere in your template (hopefully somewhere people will notice) and your visitors will see a drop-down menu, where they can select usually from up to eleven languages to read the page in (non-English languages will have fewer options).

If you’d like to display flags of different countries as a means of showing translated versions, you can hack the code to link the flags to the proper translation. You’ll need to link the flags to URLs like this one:

http://www.windowslivetranslator.com:80/BV.aspx?lp=en_nl&a=WEBSITEADDRESS

The “WEBSITEADDRESS” has to be replaced with the actual web address, or a function that inserts the web address, and “en_nl” has to be replaced with the codes for the original language (”en” for English) and the language being translated into (”nl” for Dutch). To see this page in Dutch, click here.

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The new Windows Live offering is a key element in Microsoft’s software plus services approach, designed to deliver a desktop and web experience that work naturally together. This next generation (Wave 2) of Windows Live services provides an all-in-one package to help consumers easily communicate, connect, share and stay safe on the internet.

Today’s launch features enhancements to existing popular features, such as Windows Live Hotmail, Messenger and Spaces, as well as integration of some additional new tools into the Windows Live Suite:

• Windows Live Unified Installer: Offers the option of an all-in-one download for the full Windows Live suite of downloadable services
• Windows Live Events: A new service for planning events – from inviting friends with any email address to sharing photos after the event
• Windows Live Writer: A desktop application that simplifies the process of publishing content to a blog
• Windows Live Photo Gallery: A complete solution for finding, fixing, organizing and sharing your digital memories, including photos and videos

The new Windows Live Photo Gallery is a perfect example of the integration of software plus services in Windows Live. This application runs on Windows Vista or Windows XP SP2, and has built-in links to Windows Live Spaces and Windows Live Mail. Customers get the offline access and responsiveness of a rich application, plus the online service benefits of easy sharing and anywhere access.

“Entertainment, community and communication are all deeply intertwined elements of Windows Live,” said Sharon Baylay, General Manager, Microsoft Online Services Group UK. “The suite combines serious communication with a great deal of fun – sending videos, sharing photos, planning events, flirting, chatting, sharing stories and more.  We are offering a rich set of software plus web services covering communications, community and entertainment that our customers can use on their desktop or on the move”.

“Five years from now we expect every software product to have a companion online service to support it – customers will come to think of this as standard. It is our software plus services approach that allows us to deliver this and we are one of very few companies that can execute this at scale. We believe the seamless integration between online and offline services will enable us to offer our customers an enhanced user experience.”

The free upgrade for Windows Live is available to download at once, or users can pick and choose their favourite services at http://get.live.com/ and http://www.windowslive.com/

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People with multiple Windows Live IDs have the opportunity to link all of them together from the service’s management screen. For those who have experimented with Spaces under one ID, and Hotmail under another, for example, this brings the two together.

The services remain the same. On the web, there is Hotmail, Spaces, and the new Events, a calendar and sharing product for planning get-togethers and other activities.

Microsoft really wants people to pick up the package of PC software for Windows Live. Those downloadable products include Mail, Messenger, the new Photo Gallery, Writer, and the Windows Live Toolbar.

Part of Microsoft’s OneCare security service may be obtained as part of Windows Live. The Family Safety product provides a shield to keep inappropriate content off one’s computer and away from younger Internet users.

The launch of Windows Live took the beta label off the various services. Microsoft’s promotion of the new Windows Live included children’s medical nonprofit Operation Smile, which will receive a portion of Windows Live Spaces’ advertising revenue through November and December.

You could even add the button to your email or forum signature, and there are multiple button designs, colors and taglines available to customize it for your needs.

I don’t like that the button’s source code exposes your Live ID, and thus your Hotmail email address, with no effort by Microsoft to obfuscate the email. That’s the kind of mistake Google makes every time it launches a product, and I expect smarter moves from Microsoft. As a result, clicking the button up there will launch an IM window, but you’ll be talking to my good friend joeyjoejoejunior5@hotmail.com, not me.

(via LiveSide)

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Google first showed off a few languages of its system 18 months ago (which means it’s probably been in development for at least twice that long), explaining how they use statistical learning techniques to provide a better translation. At least now we know why Google never bothered upgrading to the newer version of Systran’s software that Windows Live uses. Should be exciting, comparing the differences now between the two systems and figuring out which does a better job.

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For just about any type of gathering you could conceive, Windows Live Events has a template at the ready.  As users work with these, some of the standard stuff that Facebook fans have come to expect is present – general descriptions, directions, and attendee lists.

“But I think the coolest thing about Events is that you can use it as an online scrapbook for memories of the event,” adds Microsoft’s “Kirsten B.” in a Windows Live blog entry.  “Your guests can go to the website before and after the party to post comments, tell stories, and share photos.”  This could save some clicking-around, compared to competitors’ services.

So will Windows Live Events gain any traction?  Probably, among Microsoft fans and those who stay within that family of products out of habit.  But to grab people who have ventured further into the Web, Microsoft may need to put a little more “oomph” into its latest offering.  An example that illustrates the problem: the monkey in a CareerBuilder ad was the most interesting thing on Windows Live Events’s homepage.