Engineering colleges to get their own exclusive social network

It's our desi facebook. All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and Microsoft have collaborated to host a communication service that offers e-mail, instant messaging, Microsoft Office web apps, 10GB inbox for 7.5 million engineering students and 5 lakh faculty members spread over 10,000 technical institutes across the country. 

 Live@edu - to be up and running in the next three months - will use cloud deployment to expand students' access to high-quality technical education. This will allow students to interact and share content both for work and social networking, and even initiate collaborative research projects. 

 Speaking at the occasion HRD minister Kapil Sibal said, ``this is an era of collaboration and we hope to empower 7.5 million students and 5 lakh teachers with this use of technology. It is the first project of its kind.'' 

 Live@edu will be a social networking site linked to its portal, allowing engineering students interact with each other about their projects with applications intended for educational needs and as a solution to provide better communication and collaboration platform both for institutes and students. 

 Talking about the social networking platform, AICTE chairman S S Mantha said the site will help "every student to put their research work on the portal and have an exchange". "This application (live@edu) along with social networking will provide immense opportunities to students to interact and work with other projects," he said. 

 Mantha added, ``Microsoft's cloud platform will make a progressive ecosystem and contribute to the country's technical education by providing a better communication and collaborative platform for institutes and students.'' 

 According to Microsoft, the cloud suite has more than 22 million people using the service. Microsoft MD Sanket Akerkar said that the implementation was underway, and the deployment would be complete by mid-June. 

 The platform will be used for student communication and collaboration. It will include email, calendars with 10GB inbox, 25 GB additional file storage, documents haring, instant messaging, video chat and mobile email. More than 10,000 schools in over 130 countries have enrolled in live@edu.