Windows Live Goes to College

Tobias writes "BetaNews is reporting that Microsoft has struck a deal with 72 different colleges to use Windows Live for their email services. The problem with this is that Windows Live does not support any browsers besides IE 6, does not support POP or IMAP, and does not support email forwarding." From the article: "The Redmond company believes that catching the students early on will turn them into life-long users of Windows Live. They would likely create a Windows Live Messenger account, start a blog and organize their favorites under this e-mail account -- especially if they plan to continue using it, Microsoft says."

Comments

It does work on Firefox

[figleaf]

I am not sure were that IE6 only blurb came from.

Re:It does work on Firefox

[Edward Scissorhands]

No, IT DOES NOT WORK ON FIREFOX. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but the functionality on Firefox is limited. When you access Windows Live Mail Beta on Firefox you are getting absolutely NO ajax-style features. There is no preview pane. There is no interactivity whatsoever. There is even a bolded error message telling you that you are in "Hotmail Classic" mode which is even less featured than the old Hotmail interface. The bolded message suggests that you navigate to the "options" menu and turn on the full interactive Live Beta experience. You can do that in Firefox, but NOTHING HAPPENS and you will be greeted with the same bolded message whenever you look at your inbox. It tells you that you need to be using IE to fully use Live. It's completely unusable without ANY javascript functionality, you know.

It doesn't work. Microsoft is dragging their feet on Firefox support because, once again, their programmers do not know how to write to standards. Either that, or their managers are telling the programmers to wait on implementing a "workaround" for non-IE browers.

My guess though is that it's the former-- Microsoft simply doesn't hire employees that know or care about web standards. These guys are probably just learning about Firefox and the DOM as they go. They've only ever written to Microsoft's own JavaScript extensions.

In other words, they are incompetent.

Re:It does work on Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

I dub this the "Microsoft Corollary" of Hanlon's Razor.

Re:It does work on Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're actually in the beta, you'd know that the features that work in Firefox vary on their weekly builds. Given how important cross-browser support is for the rest of the Live initiative, its pretty clear to me that they will eventually support Firefox - its just not working yet.

It is actually designed to work well with FireFox

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows live compatibility (from the MS Human Interfaces Group internal sharepoint page). Sorry I'm posting as an a.i. -- I haven't signed an NDA, but still, I'm a'feared.

"Supported Browsers: IE 6.0 and above and Firefox (latest point release)*
Non-Supported Browsers: Opera and Safari

Windows Live is optimized for IE 6.0. Firefox rendering technologies provide an experience nearly identical to IE5.5, so pages designed for IE 5.5 should look good in Firefox as well. Technologies not supported in IE 6.0 may not be used when designing for Windows Live.

In many cases, pages rendered in non-supported browsers will display well, but resources should not be expended on changing designs so that they will work on non-supported browsers.

Ideally, people using non-supported browsers receive an acceptable user experience. This may mean that we display a simplified page on non-supported browsers so that users can access key functionality.

* Because Firefox is not consistent between releases, we can only guarantee to support the latest release (not all releases going forward)."

Re:Windows Live Supports Firefox

[rm69990]

Yeah, most of Windows Live does. Try using Windows Live Mail with Firefox...it isn't pretty to say the least. All of the features that make Windows Live Mail better than Hotmail are gone, and some of the features that make Hotmail usable are gone as well. You can't even mark a message as unread in Live Mail while using Firefox. No drag and drop, no preview pane. I have a Hotmail account that was using Windows Live Mail, but it is useless on my Mac, so I have now switched back to the Hotmail interface. My main email is gmail though, thank god.

I invited my non-tech friend to Gmail, and she used it as a second email account for a while. After trying out Windows Live Mail, she switched to Gmail on her main account, not liking the direction Hotmail was going.

CS department != IT

[a16]

A uni's CS department has absolutely no relation to the general mail services, or student network, of the university. Whether the CS department is badly managed or wonderfully managed, they will likely hate the people who run the main network if it's anything like my experience.

My uni has a decent CS department, who run everything for their department themselves. We have access to their solaris machines and we have all of the normal mail (POP3/IMAP/SMTP) services, and can SSH to the machines etc. etc.

The university however (and anyone on any other course) has to make use of crappy Novell Netware webmail. I could easily see them moving to this new MS system if the managers high up in the IT department were sent enough free copies of Office by MS, or whatever they are bribing them all with.

When this list is published, expect to see a lot of top uni's with deccent CS departments in there. And whether or not they have a decent CS department or not, we can't say "oh it's ok, they don't have MIT so it doesn't mean anything" - MS are still going to be forcing literally hundreds of thousands of upcoming young adults into only knowing their own proprietary system.

Re:CS department != IT

[zerocool^]

It's a little more complicated than that, but, yeah.

I work for the Technical Staff of the CS department at Virginia Tech. Our department is not responsible for the university infrastructure (that's these guys). However, we are closely tied in with them. Way "back in the day", there was no CNS, and the Computer Science department did run the campus infrastructure (when there were something on the order of 20 terminals on campus). One of the people that works with me helped to run the first network here at VT - it was thicknet of some sort, the big fat orange stuff you hit with a vampire tap and a $15,000 box from DEC. We ran DECnet for a while before we switched to TCP/IP and moved away from Vax/VMS to DEC/Ultrix, I think.

Granted, that has been quite a while ago, and the folks that were here long ago gave control to CNS. But, many CNS employees were once CS employees of one sort or another, and they value our opinion.

We also have all of our own infrastructure, partly because our faculty at one point complained (so I'm told, this was before I was hired) about the campus email server going up and down like a [write your own joke here and submit to reader's digest]. So, we have insulated ourselves from occurances like university brain fart and switch to MS Live Email Super XXP or whatever. We have our own web services, email with pop3/imap-ssl/webmail, our own backup system with 2 6TB disk arrays and a tape autoloader, our own SAN, etc. In some ways, I envy the infrastructure that CNS can provide. In others, we're ahead of them, because the economics of scale work against them.

And on that note, I doubt that this MS Live thing will be rolled out at (as a grandparent said) Div-1A schools. When you're the size of VT, or Penn State, or UT, or Umich, your email is an order of magnitude more vast than Oral Roberts God Fearing U, or whatever the GP said. We have half a million university PIDs, including one for each of the 33,000 students currently enrolled, one for each staff and faculty member, and one for every alumnus in the past 10 years, and at last I heard, we were attempting to work out something at the university level where people could (don't quote me) keep their @vt.edu email address forever, and maybe at some point it would become a forward only, but it would be the same address forever. Anyway, however you look at it, that's a crapload of email addresses, which we currently provide pop3, imap, and webmail, and in some cases exchange functionality, with. Without pop3, the disk space requirements would become so vast so quickly it would be hard to keep up. From what CNS says, the university receives and sends something like 2-3 million emails an hour on average, and 10 mil on peak times. I know they use this live thing for hotmail, but I just don't see it working out on this scale - at least not if people want the same level of functionality.

~Will

Re:how long...

[Jesus_666]

As far as everyone who has used it has already posted, Windows Live has a fallback mechanism in case the user doesn't use IE6. In that case it reverts to a basic interface called "Hotmail Classic". Just dont' let your script pretend it's the IE and you should automatically get served HTML.

Hate to break it to you, YOU ARE WRONG

[everphilski]

Sorry bud, works great here. Firefox 1.5.0.2.

There is no preview pane.

Sure is! Pretty pictures and all. Looks like Bush is probing gas prices.

There is no interactivity whatsoever.

I can drag/drop windows around, pop config menus, hit the +,- buttons, sure works great for me!

Suggest upgrading your Firefox. Or turning Javascript back on. One of the two.

Re:how long...

[Kadin2048]

Email is SMTP... anything else is GUI fluff, and should be interchangable.

You forget, this is Microsoft that we're talking about; they're not going to let you get near anything that's open, easily understood, and platform-independent, like SMTP. All you have access to in Windows Live is a browser-based webmail service, one that's written so that you can only access it with IE.

I expect that all the backend stuff, the actual mailservers, are all owned by Microsoft (this would be the advantage to the schools -- "no need to run your own infrastructure anymore!") so there's no way to get to them any other way.

Basically, they've made the "GUI fluff" an inherent part of the experience, and impossible to do without. Too bad, because from a computer-science perspective it doesn't do much to demystify email, which ought to be a fairly elementary concept (and one you can easily demonstrate by telling someone to Telnet to port 110 or 25).

I can't believe that people don't go apeshit just for not being able to use a real email client program, and having to use this web-based filth in the first place. I've used GMail and Yahoo, which I suspect are probably better-designed than MS's take on webmail, and neither of them come close to holding a candle to even an old version of Eurora in terms of sorting and organizing messages (although GMail does search better than all but the most recent versions of Apple Mail does). The whole thing is a terrible idea.