Microsoft Live@edu
Customer Solution Case Study
Ivy League School Uses Targeted Marketing to
Promote Web-based Collaboration
Customer: University of Pennsylvania
Web Site: www.upenn.edu
Customer Size: 20,000
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Education
Customer Profile
The University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia, founded by Benjamin Franklin
in 1740, is home to nearly 10,000 undergraduates. Another 10,000 students are
enrolled in the university’s 12 graduate
and professional schools.
Software and Services
 Services
− Microsoft Live@edu
− Microsoft Office Live Workspace
− Windows Live SkyDrive
For more information about other Microsoft
customer successes, please visit:
www.microsoft.com/casestudies
“The more we knew about why students used a
particular e-mail service, the better we could promote
Live@edu. Surveys are a great tool for this.”
Ira Winston, Chief Information Officer, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania’s College of Arts and Sciences
recently introduced Microsoft® Live@edu to 6,500 undergraduate
students. Its administrators used a combination of targeted e-mail
marketing messages and satisfaction surveys to drive adoption of
the free hosted communication and collaboration services from
Microsoft. So far, thousands of undergrads have converted.
Business Needs
The University of Pennsylvania (Penn) is a
historic, Ivy League university that regularly
ranks among the top 10 in the annual U.S.
News & World Report survey of U.S. universities. Of Penn’s four undergraduate schools,
the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) is
home to the College of Arts and Sciences
(the College), which has approximately
6,500 undergrads.
SAS offered an in-house, existing Internet
Message Access Protocol (IMAP)/Post Office
Protocol (POP) e-mail service to its
undergraduates, but more than 30 percent
of its College students forwarded their e-mail
to other personal e-mail accounts. “We were
at a crossroads,” recalls Ira Winston, Chief
Information Officer at SAS. “Either we
replace the existing system, or we find an
externally hosted solution.”
SAS found that solution with Microsoft ®
Live@edu and began offering the services,
co-branded as Penn Live, to returning
College students in July 2007. Penn Live was
offered as an alternative to allowing
students to forward their SAS e-mail to a
personal account. The College extended that
offer to first-year students in August 2007.
The College faced a challenge in promoting
the new Web-based e-mail account, instant
messaging, blogging, and other online
communication and collaboration services to
its target market of students within the
College but not to the student body at large.
Also, as Penn Live is not a mandated e-mail
service, it was important that the College
effectively highlight the advantages of
students choosing Live@edu over the
personal e-mail accounts they had been
using or the school’s legacy e-mail solution.
Solution
Given the specific audience for Penn Live, the
School of Arts and Sciences decided to
develop a targeted promotional campaign.
Administration took advantage of the fact that
SAS had already collected all students’
personal e-mail addresses as part of the
registration process. “We didn’t want to stand
on the campus green giving out handouts, as
that would have reached students outside our
school,” says Winston. “Instead, we used email as a way to connect with the students
and discover more about the audience we
wanted to address.”
The following best practices evolved out of
SAS’s experience promoting Penn Live to its
College students since introducing the
services in July 2007.
Get the students involved. As part of the
Penn Live initiative, the College established
a SAS Computing Student Technology
Advisory Board, a group of SAS students
from diverse academic backgrounds
representing the SAS student body on
technology-related issues. “For the
2008/2009 academic year, we plan to
consult with this group about promoting
Microsoft Office Live Workspace and
Windows Live™ SkyDrive™ [storage
technology],” says Chris Mustazza, Project
Leader for Student Technology Systems.
“We’re also training the 180 students who
do IT support in the residence halls about
the new services.”
 Prepare the students. One month before
the July 2007 launch date for Penn Live,
SAS broadcast an e-mail announcement to
students that explained the enhanced email service and online collaboration
features that were coming. “We highlighted
the increased storage capacity, reliability,
and improved Web interface because we

knew these were issues the students had
with our e-mail service,” says Winston.
 Give the students choices to drive
acceptance. Because SAS has a history of
giving students a choice about their e-mail
providers, it didn’t want to mandate the
new services. Instead, to drive adoption,
SAS is taking every opportunity to help
students explore the exciting new
technologies offered by Live. “We modified
the application process to create Penn
Live accounts so there is an option for
creating an account without having to
forward your e-mail to it,” says Mustazza.
“This way we get students to create a
Windows Live ID in the SAS domain so
they can take advantage of the other
collaborative features like Office Live
Workspace and SkyDrive.”
 Target marketing to specific audiences.
Beginning in September 2007, SAS began
a targeted campaign to drive adoption.
“We could see which students were still
forwarding their e-mails and worked from
there,” explains Mustazza. “To those still
forwarding to a Hotmail® account, we
explained that Penn Live has great collaboration features, and no advertising. We
also showed them how to link their
Hotmail account to their Penn Live
account to have both. To the AOL users,
we explained about the better user
interface that Penn Live offers. We sent emails to students still using our existing
POP e-mail solution to remind them that
Penn Live also supports POP. The week
after we sent these e-mails, we saw the
number of subscriptions increase.”
 Conduct surveys to provide better
support. SAS conducted several
satisfaction surveys to learn about the
students’ experience with the new e-mail
service. “The lesson learned here is not to
make the survey anonymous,” says
Winston. “We contacted everyone who
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published June 2008
cited a fixable problem and offered them a
solution. This enabled us to step in quickly
and stop rumors such as that Penn Live
doesn’t work with your BlackBerry device.”
 Create online information resources. SAS
built a Penn Live FAQ portal that provides
information about activating and using the
services, with links to more technical
FAQs. “You can tailor the Web documentation to perceived issues gleaned from
survey results or help-desk tickets,” says
Mustazza. “That way your online information directly answers the students’ questions. Once that information is up on the
Web, the help desk can send students to a
URL for self-service support.”
 Focus on the e-mail first. For the first
year, SAS decided to focus on promoting
the “core” e-mail and calendaring features
to get students used to the new service.
This fall, it will promote adoption of Microsoft Office Live Workspace and SkyDrive
as a cohesive pair. “We are hoping to get
early access to the Windows Live mail
client for the BlackBerry,” says Winston.
 Take advantage of your Microsoft
partnership. “Our weekly conference calls
with our Microsoft contacts have been
invaluable,” says Winston. “Just knowing
that we have an escalation path to the
right person is a good thing.”
Benefits
The School of Arts and Sciences has experienced an impressive adoption rate among
the 6,500 College undergrads. “Between
spring and fall of 2007, we have gone from
70 percent of our students using our old
Web mail service down to 19 percent,”
Winston reports. “We are looking forward to
seeing how students begin to adopt the
Office Live Workspace and SkyDrive
collaborative services next fall.”