Higher Education Consortium Invitation

The Higher Education Consortium program has been designed based on feedback received from multiple Higher Education institutions over the last few years. Its focus is to enable New and Innovative Workflows in Higher Education. New and Innovative Workflows can span the gamut from enabling next generation Student Collaboration to Service Oriented Architectures.

We believe that the consortium could be a vehicle for Microsoft and the Higher Education community to collaboratively transform ideas that have been gestating into real tangible solutions. The consortium becomes a venue for the community to debate and validate ideas. Validated concepts become the feedback mechanism for future Microsoft products and investments.

Any consortium has legs only if it can prove that it can deliver tangible results. As such, a small set of projects around student and classroom collaboration have been identified with a delivery timeframe of Late November / Early December 2007.

In the next few weeks, we will be collecting and consolidating specifications for these projects. We need your help in reviewing and driving successful outcomes for these projects. All projects directed by the consortium will be made available as Shared Source Code for the benefit of all Higher Education institutions. As these projects are delivered, we will look to the consortium to advice on the next phase of effort.

The consortium will consist of 4 Boards so that peers can collaborate with one another and Microsoft on these projects. They are the following:

community-colleges-board@groups.msn.com

independent-colleges-board@groups.msn.com

research-universities-board@groups.msn.com

state-colleges-board@groups.msn.com

If you wish to participate in any of these boards, please send email to hsc@microsoft.com.